Inside the Bizarre Romance Scams Using This Army General’s Identity

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When four-star Gen. Stephen J. Townsend found himself in a financial bind while deployed overseas in 2019, he did what any top commander in the U.S. military would: get on Facebook to contact a 74-year-old widow he had never met before.

In N.W.’s case, the bogus Townsend instructed her to send checks totaling $140,150 to a group of men in Vineyard, Utah, who kept some of the money and transferred some of it to various bank accounts in Nigeria. Two of the men are now in federal prison.

, which went on from at least 2017 to 2019, and ordered his 2013 Lexus GS 350 and a $7.1 million house in Houston, Texas to be seized by the government.In the complaint unsealed Friday, which, the scammers, again acting as Townsend, are accused of extracting some $50,000 from a second widow identified only as “S.L.”

“He told her he needed $50,000 to fly out on a jet specially equipped with bomb or missile detection,” the filing states, adding that the ersatz Townsend directed S.L. to send the checks to two men in Utah who were part of the same ring as Kalu. Kalu’s role was to deposit a portion of the funds in U.S. banks, after which it would be distributed among the rest of the crew. In a December 2017 phone call with American First Credit Union, Kalu told a customer service rep that the money he was receiving came from family members who were investing in a construction project in Nigeria, according to the complaint.

 

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Thanks for the inspiration

Those scammers poach pictures of military officers all the time. You MUST do Google image searches on any picture of a military personnel that you don’t know. Chances are, you’re dealing w/a scammer in Africa.

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