A Rich Stranger Wants to Give You All His Money. There’s a Catch.

While there are several versions of the original scam’s setup, this is the most common: On his deathbed, so it goes, in 1972, Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, revealed he had hidden tens of thousands of gold bars and sums of cash amounting to untold millions in Swiss vaults. This was set up in a trust that could only be accessed by his close confidant — Blay-Miezah. Once the conditions of the trust were satisfied, the money would be released, the bulk for the development of Ghana. The rest would go to the faithful Blay-Miezah — and his investors.

“Just after independence,” Yeebo explains, “there really was a plot to take Ghana’s gold reserves out of the country.” She details the colonial British administration’s hopeless mismanagements of funds. The depth of distress did raise the question of where all of the money had gone — leaving just enough room for suspicion that Blay-Miezah’s story could be true.

Born in 1941 in a tiny coastal village, Blay-Miezah honed his ability to read people at an early age. This, along with a practiced charm, a phenomenal memory and an absolute lack of shame, would prove a lethal combination. First in service jobs at exclusive private clubs, later during his first stint in jail (for petty frauds), where he was imprisoned with elites who were out of favor with successive regimes, he’d learn “how a powerful man should sit, how he should nod his head, how he should take up space in a room.”

Prison is also where he would meet a radical chaplain and steal his language, framing his scheme as a Pan-African venture. In later years, Blay-Miezah and his partners “were selling liberation: a chance to repair the wounds of colonialism,” writes the author. “To everyone else, they were selling the chance to loot an African country’s ancestral wealth.”

For Blay-Miezah, it was crucial that he stay on good terms with the regime; in a time before scams were conducted without the easy mask of an email address, he needed a diplomatic passport to convince his investors he had access to the fund, was making the requisite travel to Switzerland and taking meetings with European bankers.