The Weekly season 1 episode 7 recap: Connecting the World

Finding the scammer

Back on the goal of finding the specific scammer who preyed on Renee and Maria, Nicas says that Maria was able to finesse a new name and Nigerian address out of the scammer by saying she had a package to send him.

Nicas heads to the location with a local journalist, Tony Iyare. They manage to get the guy on the phone, but as soon as Nicas brings up that he’s a journalist, the man hangs up. Then they start knocking on doors of the addresses they have, but keep coming up empty.

Nicas tries calling again, but doesn’t get an answer. The guy had shut off his phone.

In a last ditch effort, Nicas tries again to get ahold of the man scamming Maria, saying he wants to tell his story. The man texts him back saying he doesn’t want to talk and tells Nicas to leave him and his family alone.

Nicas says he really wanted to find the end of this trail for Maria and Renee, but the trail had gone cold.

Back in the United States, this episode of The Weekly winds down with Nicas contacting Facebook, explaining the story he was working on. They refused an interview, and instead sent a statement essentially saying they’re working on it.

You can hear the dejection in Nicas’ voice as he says that it’s frustrating to be getting the same runaround from Facebook that he’s getting from the Nigerian scammer.

The episode ends with Nicas sitting down with Anonsen again, showing him a spreadsheet of accounts impersonating him. Nicas says he’s reported them all and of the 65, 47 are still up. Nicas not-so-subtly wonders how much of Facebook’s claimed caution around not wanting to delete real profiles when looking through reported fakes has to do with the fact that they measure their website’s success on the total number of users.

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