Scott Johnson

It was very strange to suddenly be, to feel like I was inhabiting his imagination in a way.

But as a writer, it was great material because he would like,

He would just tell me these absolutely wonderful stories about trips he'd taken and people he'd met and what it meant for him and his development as a person.

And I just found all that stuff fascinating.

Yeah, so I left him in Manchester.

I went back to Seattle.

As far as I know, he stayed in his apart hotel there where I had found him originally.

And we carried on having these conversations.

And over the course of the next several weeks, I had conversations with him, but I was sort of simultaneously through other sources, investigatory sources and law enforcement and this kind of thing,

tracking what he was doing, you know, purely on the for the scam.

And one day I learned that I got a report basically that that very day he had

you know a victim had had had revealed that he had sent something like a few thousand dollars anyway to uh to to to to the scammer and what had happened is that he had

Ever since COVID started, he had started tailoring the scam to COVID.

So people were paying money for online courses, for instance, like martial arts training, acting classes.

There were a whole range of services that people were paying for online.

in a remote capacity and then wiring money overseas for the work.

And so instead of being crippled by the pandemic in the way that so many people were, he adapted.

And so that was happening

Some of it anyway was happening, it appears, while I was talking to him.

And I should say, while he was expressing at various points a great deal of remorse or supposed remorse for the things that he had done.