[JohnnyB]

This reminds me a lot of a situation I ran into a few years back.

I was working as the head of primary in a k-12 international school here in China. The school hired a new teacher for the middle school just before our head of middle school and school principal went out for a week-long conference. I was in charge of the whole school while they were gone so I had numerous interactions with the new teacher. Something about him just didn't feel right to me, like he was being really nice while surreptitiously testing the system for cracks, so I spent an evening googling him and digging into his background. Then I found a 20+ page thread about the guy on an expat discussion board in Taiwan. Turned out that while in Taiwan he had scammed a bunch of people into giving him money as part of a fake online radio venture. Then, in order to get more money he had faked the kidnapping of his own daughter and collected money from loads of people to help him "pay for her ransom"!

Needless to say, we got rid of him immediately but it blew me away how many worms came out of the woodwork on what he had been up to in less than two weeks at our school. In that short time he had already borrowed money from a bunch of kind teachers "to set up his apartment for his wife and daughter coming", he'd had two teachers over at his apartment to "test their voices for internet radio", he had even talked to a couple of students about involving them and their families, he had tried selling fake Apple products (which I later found he was also doing online while posing as a retailer from the states) and he had even copped an inappropriate and unwanted feel on our special ed teacher. It went deeper too, with name/identity changes and while we got rid of him, I'm sure he's still plying that twisted trade off in some other place.

Anyways, the long and the short of it is good on MMF for calling him out. It's too bad that there are people around who take advantage of the good will and admirable desires of communities. Based on how everything looks now, I'm glad he's been weeded out of CP.

EDIT: To add, I don't know anything about PIMking beyond his posts on CP, so I'm not meaning to claim that he is some professional con artist, because I don't know. I'm just sharing my story because this event reminds me it.