Online romance scam dupes Australian mother into drug-smuggling nightmare

Updated

The mother. The online relationship. The scam that's destroying lives. This is how vulnerable Australians are being lured into carrying illegal drugs for a powerful international cartel.

"It's you or nothing. Just as simple as that," a man who called himself Precious Max told Yoshe Taylor in an online message. "I hope you have eaten hon," he said in another. He worried about whether the Queensland teacher and single mother was sleeping. "You have a busy day in the morning," he reminded her.

The messages that flew between the two through 2013 were intense, detailed, loving.

Around the same time, the Cambodian-based fraudster was sending similar messages to a Melbourne woman, who only wants to be identified by the pseudonym Kay Smith.

"Hello love, just wanted to say goodnight and sweet dreams … love you so much and forever," he wrote one night. On another occasion he told her he was at the orphanage where he helped out. "The kids here are asking when I will bring my wife too. Almost cried."

Neither woman was aware of the other's existence. Both thought Precious Max was a sweet and loving South African-born businessman. Both had met Precious Max through the social and dating network, Tagged, when they were in highly vulnerable states. Kay, a single woman who lived in suburban Melbourne, had never been in a long-term relationship. She had just emerged from a bruising encounter with "a serial dater". She didn't have regular work.

Yoshe, a tall woman with beautiful blue eyes and a gap-toothed smile, had been seriously depressed. Her relationship with her partner had fallen apart and her job as a primary school teacher in the small town of Esk, midway between Brisbane and Toowoomba, had ended. She was struggling to pay her mortgage.

A friend suggested it was time she tried to meet someone. "I had been all by myself for a long time, four years, just me and the kids," says Yoshe in An Innocent Abroad, the first episode in ABC Australian Story's new season.

On Tagged, Yoshe started to meet and talk to people from all over the world. And then she found herself in conversation with Precious Max.

He told her about his volunteer work at an orphanage in Phnom Penh. She was fascinated because she loved children and working with children.

"I was talking to him for a long time; I thought I got to know him and he seemed very nice," says Yoshe, who told him about the things that mattered to her, including loyalty and honesty. "I am proud of my honesty, most humans aren't," she wrote in one message.

But the seemingly caring messages would come to an end. By Christmas 2013, an innocent Yoshe, then 41, was distraught, locked up in a Cambodian jail and facing charges of international drug smuggling. Meanwhile, Kay, then 44, was sitting in a maximum-security detention centre in Melbourne's outer west. She had unwittingly returned from her first trip to Cambodia to meet Precious Max with 2 kilograms of heroin concealed in the lining of two laptop bags.

'I had no hope'

Yoshe and Kay both fell prey to an international drug smuggling syndicate targeting vulnerable women and men through online dating sites. Precious Max worked for the syndicate grooming potential drug mules.

Kay spent six months in the Dame Phyllis Frost women's prison and then 18 months on bail before the charges against her were dropped.

Yoshe's journey was cripplingly longer: she spent six years in a Cambodian jail, battling health issues, desperately missing her children, and seemingly forgotten by everyone, except her family and friends.

"I knew I wasn't important so I didn't think anyone would do anything to help me," she says now. "I was a mushroom, I didn't know what was going on."

Speaking publicly for the first time since her release and return to Australia in May, Yoshe tells Australian Story she's sharing her story as a warning to others — if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

"If one person is protected because they've seen the story, if it can save one other Australian, I'll be really happy," she says.

For the first few days after Yoshe was detained at the Phnom Penh airport she had no idea what to do. "I asked for a lawyer because of watching American television crime shows." She was given a list of lawyers but didn't know how to choose the right one.

Yoshe was sent to the notorious Prey Sar Prison where she shared a cell with 99 other women. There were sleeping platforms on each side, but it was so overcrowded that most women were forced to sleep spooned up against each other along a central aisle.

There were three toilet bowls at one end of the room. "No wall, no curtains, no plumbing. They're just toilet bowls on the floor."

Three weeks later she moved to a smaller prison where conditions improved slightly.

Yoshe's children were still young when she was arrested; Kahlyla, then 11, and Archer, then 6.

"Shortly after she was arrested, she called us and it was really sad," Kahlyla says. "Archer and I cried and she cried, she was telling us she loves us and hopes she sees us soon. And it was pretty sad, especially because we never got a call after that."

By April 2014 as Yoshe's trial loomed, she had only met her lawyer once. She had a translator beside her as witnesses gave evidence during the trial, but on the day of the verdict she had no one interpreting for her. It was an hour or so before someone told her she would spend the next 23 years in a Cambodian jail.

In the days after the verdict, she stopped eating. Photographs taken during her time in jail show an angular face etched with pain.

"I didn't feel hungry, I didn't feel anything. I just had no hope," Yoshe says.

"I did not want to spend 23 years away from my children. I actually thought the death penalty was a much better idea than being in jail for 23 years."

"Precious was supposed to be my friend."

A profile, a smile: The scam

Little did Yoshe know that Precious Max was not South African, but a then-24-year-old Nigerian whose real name was Precious Chineme Nwoko.

He targeted a number of dating and social media sites, including Tagged, Facebook and Badoo. In one of his online profiles, he said he was 43, single and lived in Phnom Penh. "I want to meet women aged 27-45," he said in the profile.

Nwoko posted photographs of himself that revealed a welcoming smile, a gym-toned body and shoulder-length cornrow braids. Other shots showed he liked shiny suits in silver and royal blue and plenty of jewellery.

"One of the amazing things was how much work and effort Precious Max would put into convincing these women that he was interested in a romantic relationship with them," says Alex Wilson, a Melbourne-based solicitor who eventually represented Yoshe.

"He's always using very loving terms of endearment for her, inquiring after how she is and what she's doing, and also encouraging her that they should meet in person."

'I didn't question him': How Kay was scammed

Kay quickly came to believe in Nwoko's integrity after they started talking on Tagged in late 2011. "We just talked about life and sort of got serious after a while," she says. "I had feelings for him; I just wanted to see where it'd go."

She thought she was in an exclusive relationship with the man who she only knew as Precious Max.

According to Luke McMahon, another Melbourne-based lawyer who investigated the case, Nwoko's modus operandi was that, after months of intense communication with women, he would ask them to do things for him that would contribute to their belief that they had a trusted relationship.

"This is quite a sophisticated way of manipulating people," he explains. "He played on his victims' vulnerability."

In the case of Kay, Nwoko had parcels delivered to her Melbourne address — laptops, phones, shirts — and asked her to forward them on to him in Cambodia to help with his import/export business.

Kay believed his stories. "I believe what people tell me until I know different. I didn't question him, I didn't look him up on Google," she says.

About a year into their online relationship, Nwoko organised for Kay to visit him in Phnom Penh. He paid for her flights and her passport, but it was only to be a four-day trip. "I asked him why the stay was so short, and he said that he had urgent business to attend to and that I could come back weeks later."

It was her first trip overseas, in fact her first time on an aeroplane. "I was petrified the whole journey." But when Kay finally found Nwoko at Phnom Penh's airport she relaxed. "He was as good looking in person as he was online," she says.

It was the start of a dizzying few days. He took her to a hotel and stayed with her there. On the first night they went out for dinner and he asked her to marry him. "Stupidly I said yes. I just thought this was a dream come true. It's what I'd wanted."

On her last night in the city, Nwoko arrived in the hotel room with two laptop bags. They were packed with arts and crafts products and he asked her to take them back to an associate of his in Australia.

Border Security was one of Kay's favourite television shows. She knew she needed to be able to say at Customs that she'd packed her bags herself. She pulled everything out of the laptop bags. They held ornaments, T-shirts, placemats. "Nothing was untoward," she says.

On the morning of August 29, 2013, Kay landed at Melbourne Airport. When customs officers asked her why she had taken such a short trip to Cambodia she said: "It was a surprise engagement. It was my own." Officers took her bags away to check their contents.

Heart-rending airport CCTV footage shows Kay collapsing as she learns that about 2 kilograms of heroin had been stitched into the lining of the laptop bags. She crouched on the floor sobbing. She stood up and sat on a chair. She crumpled again to the floor.

"I'd lived an honest life, a really honest life," Kay tells Australian Story. "In the space of four days, this guy destroyed my entire life, my existence."

How Yoshe was lured into web of lies

Yoshe's online conversations with Nwoko in 2013 provided solace and companionship as she navigated a personal breakdown caused by job loss, separation and money troubles.

Nwoko suggested several times that Yoshe should visit him in Cambodia. She was tempted, but she had to worry about her children. They were her primary responsibility — their father had moved interstate. "I'd never been anywhere," Yoshe recalls. "I wanted to go somewhere."

Meanwhile, Nwoko was trying to draw her into his web: at one point, he asked her to sell a mobile phone for him, but unlike Kay, she refused.

Before she agreed to go to Cambodia, she asked the man she knew as Precious to send her a copy of his passport. "I wanted to know that he was a real person," she says. She also insisted he pay for the ticket in cash as she'd heard about credit card scams.

On June 27, 2013, Yoshe flew to Phnom Penh. It was her first overseas trip.

Nwoko escorted her around the city. He arranged for her to get her nails done and have a massage. "I had a really good time," says Yoshe, and her face lights up as she remembers the sight of five people on one motorbike.

But she realised that a serious love affair was out of the question. He was too young. She told him she was fond of him as a friend but nothing more.

Nwoko shifted tactics. His was a long game. He knew she needed a new career and formed a new scenario.

He asked her if she'd be interested in launching and running a Khmer Arts and Craft shop in Queensland for his boss's friend. Yoshe was excited by the idea. It would be a new start for her, she thought. Soon after returning to Australia, she received a letter of offer to manage the shop.

The contract said the company would pay six months' rent in advance on a space for the shop. "That made me feel very safe, like that means that there was a commitment there." Nwoko asked her to return to Cambodia to sort out the job.

On August 14, 2013, Yoshe flew to Cambodia for the second time. It was a busy trip packed with business meetings. On her last day in Phnom Penh, Nwoko told her the company wanted her to carry some product samples back to Australia and pass them on to a man in Brisbane. "I was happy to do something helpful for the new boss," she said.

But like Kay, she knew she needed to be sure that what she was carrying was legitimate. She emptied the contents of the bag on to the hotel bed. Nothing seemed untoward.

Her trip home was uneventful. A day or so after, she handed over the bag to the man Nwoko had specified. Yoshe had no idea that her life's journey was starting to intersect with that of another Australian woman, Kay Smith, who was preparing to fly to Cambodia for her first visit.

The ill-fated trip to Cambodia

A fortnight after Kay's arrest, Yoshe boarded a plane on September 14, 2013 for her third and final trip to Cambodia.

She had not wanted to go; she'd barely recovered from the ear and stomach infections she'd picked up on her last visit. But Nwoko insisted.

She had not been able to find a suitable rental property for the arts and crafts shop for the budget she'd been given. He told her she needed to be on the ground to sign another contract extending the funds.

When Yoshe arrived in Phnom Penh in mid-September, she was surprised to discover that Nwoko was not around. She was met at the airport by a young French woman, Charlene Savarino, who said she also worked for KNN Arts and Crafts. "I was really excited … that I was meeting a fellow employee," Yoshe recalls.

On September 18, 2013, Savarino brought a backpack to the hotel and said it contained valuable embroidered fabric samples that Yoshe needed to take back to Australia. For a second time, Yoshe emptied the bag onto her hotel room bed. She laid the fabrics out on the bed, took photos, checked that the bag's pockets contained nothing they shouldn't, then repacked the bag. "I did feel that the bag felt heavy when it was all packed, but I had been really sick so I just thought I was weak."

In the evening, Savarino returned to the hotel to take Yoshe to the Phnom Penh airport. As Yoshe walked through the airport, she heard her name called out. A Cambodian police officer asked her to step into a room. "He went straight for the backpack and he pulled out the materials and then he got out a Stanley knife and cut down the spine of the bag and that was when I saw the powder," she recalls.

There was more than 2 kilograms of heroin concealed in the bag. Yoshe was stunned.

Yoshe's memories of what followed are dim. She heard someone say that Nwoko had tricked others who had been caught in Australia arriving from Cambodia with heroin in their bags.

As Yoshe's interrogation was starting, police were swooping in on the house where Nwoko lived with a number of other men. They would find a stash of drugs and cash. Both he and Savarino were arrested. Ultimately, Nwoko was sentenced to 27 years in jail and Savarino 25 years.

Kay was in jail when she learned Nwoko had been caught. "It was probably one of the best days of my life," she says. She also heard about Yoshe's arrest. "I just felt gutted for her," Kay says. "She had two young kids in Australia and [she'd] be spending her time in a third-world prison."

Kay knew she was lucky to have been detained on Australian soil. It was her concern for Yoshe, a woman who she'd never met but suspected had been caught up in the same scam, that ultimately became the catalyst for Yoshe's release.

Watch Parts 1 and 2 of Australian Story's An Innocent Abroad ABC iview or Youtube.

Credits

Reporter: Belinda Hawkins

Feature writer: Stephanie Wood

Digital producer: Megan Mackander

Photography: Belinda Hawkins, Howard Thomas, Brad Callihoo, supplied

Topics: crime, internet-culture, human-interest, prisons-and-punishment, drug-offences, esk-4312, cambodia

First posted