Join us to hear the story of Kenneth Anim and his ex-wife Akua Dufie and how they swindled victims out of $5.3 million dollars using romance and elderly scams. This is eCrimeBytes.com S 2 Ep 9-2 – Romance And Elderly Scams With Kenneth Anim’s Samanti Group – Act 2: Make Fat Stacks.
For the background, please see the prior acts:
Romance And Elderly Scams With Kenneth Anim’s Samanti Group – Act 1: The Conspirators
Sources:
- https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63575928/united-states-v-anim/
- https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdtx/pr/dual-citizen-gets-max-laundering-romance-scam-proceeds
- https://coveringkaty.com/news/fort-bend/richmond-man-sentenced-to-five-years-for-romance-scam-target/
- https://shoutouthtx.com/meet-kenneth-anim-ceo/ (Photos)
- https://omgvoice.com/news/kenneth-anim-ghana-online-romance-scam/
- https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2023/02/28/richmond-woman-accused-of-working-as-money-mule-in-yearslong-nationwide-romance-fraud-scheme-feds-say/
Transcript:
00:00:10:00 – 00:00:30:16
Keith
Hey, welcome back to eCrimeBytes. This is season two, episode nine. We are in act two, make fat stacks of an individual that we’re talking about called Kenneth Anim and his ex-wife where they perform romance and elderly scams against their victims.
00:00:30:18 – 00:00:49:08
Keith
Now, if you haven’t seen Act One, it makes a lot more sense than jumping in here. So if you’re watching us on YouTube, I’m going to put a little link here where you can just actually jump right back and catch Act one. All right. So in Act two, this one we’re calling Make Fat Stacks. And I’m gonna Seth, I swear I’m going to use this anytime people make money now,
00:00:49:08 – 00:00:51:22
Keith
we’re going to start with our very first victim.
00:00:51:22 – 00:01:00:10
Keith
And this victim is Randy R. That’s just how the court paperwork refers to him. He’s from Baltimore, so not too far from me.
00:01:00:10 – 00:01:04:23
Keith
He was the victim that brought this to the authorities attention.
00:01:04:25 – 00:01:25:18
Keith
And usually, if you watch any type of crime show, they’re is usually the one person that reports it. And then they go and they investigate and they go, Holy shit, there’s all these other people are victims too. That’s about to happen here. So hold on. So Randy, Randy thought he met a woman through a dating website between 2013 and 2016.
00:01:25:21 – 00:01:47:24
Keith
Absolutely normal activity in this time period. It’s not like he’s cutting edge out there dating and dating is new on the web, you know, dating has been around for a while, so there’s no real reason to, I think, go into the situation alarmed or anything like we do a lot of our other episodes where there’s hacking involved in here.
00:01:47:24 – 00:02:13:09
Keith
The woman that Randy was communicating with ended up conning Randy out of 1.1 million, and I had to stop there. As I was writing my notes, I just had to think what the fuck? Listen, even if I had 1.1 million, Seth, I don’t know if I would give my own wife Andrea. 1.1 million. Oh, my God. At some point you got to go.
00:02:13:09 – 00:02:35:00
Keith
I need to meet you. Because in all these scams, there’s no real person at the other end. Right? Right. I mean, if you’re sending somebody six and seven figures, you would imagine somewhere maybe in the 4 to 5 figure range, you have a meeting with the person and make sure they’re really who they are in real life. Before you continue sending them, you know, $1,000,000.
00:02:35:02 – 00:03:02:04
Keith
So a sorry, that was a whole tangent. The money that Randy sent was traced to an Anim’s Samanti group bank accounts. Remember that picture I showed you with all those bank accounts in Act One? And I said he set them all up. It’s just one of those. So out of this 1.1 million that Randy was victimized out of, Anim withdrew half million dollars of cash.
00:03:02:07 – 00:03:20:11
Keith
So he actually had money out of it. So a lot of these things, we tell you, so-and-so broke in and they stole $5 billion, but they never actually used any of it or they never actually had any of it in their hands. In this case, Kenneth had it in his hands. He withdrew $500,000.
00:03:20:11 – 00:03:43:01
Seth
So we had a victim, Lisa L. So she met an individual around June of 2017, and she communicated with this person over email, WhatsApp or her phone. We learned that the person that they were communicating with stated they were going to ship overseas and a delivery agent that worked for this person was stopped by U.S. customs. What a sad story carrying bags of gold.
00:03:43:01 – 00:03:52:12
Seth
Now let’s pause on this. How many people do you really know, either directly or even like seven degrees later who actually deal in gold? They cases.
00:03:52:14 – 00:04:15:21
Keith
Wow. Well, Seth, hold on. Well, first of all, we had Jimmy Zhong, who had a lot of gold, and now we’re going to have Razzlekhan in our next episode who has a lot of gold. So I would say anybody who has gold is immediately suspect. Just based upon the very small amount of episodes we’ve produced on eCrimeBytes because any one time anybody has gold, there are criminal.
00:04:15:21 – 00:04:37:13
Seth
Yeah. Anyway, carrying bags of gold and cash belonging to him and that he needed funds to be able to have the gold and cash released. And then the question was, well, did you actually send money to Lisa? And Lisa was like, Yes, she sent up around sending around or wiring to over $58,000 in 2017
00:04:37:13 – 00:04:47:11
Seth
and so the money was traced to a optimal import and export and optimal import and export was owned by Kenneth.
00:04:47:11 – 00:04:52:09
Seth
Anim. Now I was hoping for some kind of Seinfeld reference there as
00:04:52:09 – 00:04:58:00
Seth
Art Vandelay is my favorite importer exporter, but apparently we can change that now to Mr. Anim.
00:04:58:02 – 00:05:06:28
Keith
Nice, nice reference. Yeah. Yes. Well, and so there’s these scams that are happening and it’s not
00:05:06:28 – 00:05:26:27
Keith
some of our cases we bring to you it’s one big hack and it happens. This is a bunch of scams that happen over time. So as you can imagine, as time progresses, you would hope someone somewhere along the financial line would say, hold on a second, this looks suspect.
00:05:26:29 – 00:05:46:13
Keith
There were some banks. They tried to do that. So what happened was Kenneth would open numerous bank accounts. And this is why I showed you that graphic up front with all the bank accounts and just showing a four or five and just saying dt dot dot and showing you know, it could be forever is because he could just open up a bunch of bank accounts.
00:05:46:15 – 00:05:53:11
Keith
And if some get close, who cares? He’ll just go open more. So he would just open up a bunch of bank accounts and
00:05:53:11 – 00:06:05:01
Keith
a lot of the banks would say that the activity that they would see on the accounts would violate their deposit account agreements.
00:06:05:01 – 00:06:11:05
Keith
So what would happen is you have banks that would freeze them and then Kenneth would then turn around and open new bank accounts.
00:06:11:05 – 00:06:15:29
Keith
So in these bank accounts, Kenneth and his ex wife,
00:06:15:29 – 00:06:35:19
Keith
it’s a tremendous amount of money for scams. We told you 1.1 million up upfront, right? Well, total, he put in $5.3 million. So there’s a whole bunch of other people that got scammed somewhere in there to make up the difference between 1.1 and 5.3 million.
00:06:35:19 – 00:06:56:17
Seth
So there were additional victims, right? There were at least 17 that were, I guess, were found through the course of the investigation. So we learned from the court documents during, I guess, a question and answer session. So in total, Agent Reyes, who I guess was the agent involved in the investigation, how much money did the defendant and the coconspirator benefit from the scheme?
00:06:56:19 – 00:07:16:22
Seth
And the answer was we traced a little over 5 million in total, received from various schemes to victims that we were able to identify, or a total of 2.2 million was received in the various accounts owned by is indiscernible but an identified coconspirator. So over $5 million in total. Yes.
00:07:16:22 – 00:07:25:07
Seth
And then further and was a significant portion of that money once it reaches the defendant and the coconspirators bank accounts sent overseas.
00:07:25:10 – 00:07:47:12
Seth
Yes. Where was it sent overseas and what were you able to trace? And I guess I could paraphrase some of this were sent via wire to a somebody Solutions Ghana Limited. So we mentioned earlier that we think he spent most of his time in Ghana and his Samanti solutions in Ghana associated with the defendant we know that it is so yes.
00:07:47:12 – 00:08:02:20
Keith
All right so the court paperwork gives us a chart later on of victim and restitution. So victims, left hand side restitution amount on the right hand side. And I’m going to just kind of give you a flavor of this. And we’re definitely not going to be
00:08:02:20 – 00:08:07:11
Keith
I’m not going to put this in the podcast with all the victim names because it just feels kind of weird.
00:08:07:14 – 00:08:37:18
Keith
But, you know, it starts with Randy. Randy was the one for 1.1 million, right? And then we got a couple people that got one 309,000. We got another 168,000. And then it just goes down from there. Got a whole bunch of people between about 25,000 and 100,000. I would say that’s almost the almost it’s like the sweet spot because most of the accounts are in there.
00:08:37:18 – 00:09:14:04
Keith
I would say that’s probably the easiest amount of money for them to get out of somebody is the 25000 to 100000 just based upon this data. And the end of the table shows us a couple stragglers. We got a $17,000 loss, we got a $13,000, and then we got another loss at $1,500. So with that, I’m going to have to have you come back and watch Act three, because we’re going to talk about when they get arrested. If there was anything in this act that you like, please, like and subscribe whatever app that you’re watching or listening to us on.
00:09:14:06 – 00:09:38:07
Keith
But if you’re on Apple podcast, please give us a five star review and tell us whatever episode that you like because that lets me know what what people find interesting and I’ll try to aim for more episodes like that. Yeah, visit our website, Please do its e crime bytes. Bytes spell the computer way with a Y or y and yellow milk dot com.
00:09:38:07 – 00:09:55:21
Keith
So it’s just ecrimebytes dot com and we got all our links and stuff across the top there. And with that please do come back for act three the arrests and we’re going to tell you a little bit more about this case and it just gets more interesting from here. So we’ll see you then. Thanks.
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