Tag Archives: True Crime

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Keanu Reeves is Not in Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud – Becky Holmes

One woman’s hilarious and fascinating quest to expose the truth behind the fraudulent Twitter romance. Scammers beware, you have met your match!

Online romance fraud is a problem across the globe. It causes financial and emotional devastation, yet many people refuse to take it seriously.

This is the story of one middle-aged woman in a cardigan determined to understand this growing phenomenon. No other woman has had so many online romances – from Keanu Reeves to Brad Pitt to Prince William – and Becky Holmes is a favourite among peacekeeping soldiers and oil rig workers who desperately need iTunes vouchers.

By winding up scammers and investigating the truth behind their profiles, Becky shines a revealing, revolting and hilarious light on a very shady corner of the internet. Featuring first-hand accounts of victims, examples of scripts used by fraudsters, a look into the psychology of fraud and of course plenty of Becky’s hysterical interactions with scammers, this is a must-read for anyone who needs a reminder that Keanu Reeves is NOT in love with them.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row – Anthony Ray Hinton, Lara Love Hardin

A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.

In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.

But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence—full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon—transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015.

With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Never Saw Me Coming: How I Outsmarted the FBI and the Entire Banking System—and Pocketed $40 Million – Tanya Smith

Tanya Smith fancied herself a folk hero, a kind of Robin Hood, using her powers of persuasion to buck the system and help the poor and needy.

It started innocently enough, with calls to celebrities’ houses with her teenage twin sister. Soon, Tanya realised she could convince utility companies to amend the balances of her friends, relatives and neighbours, clearing their overdue electricity bills with a single phone call. Eventually, as she tested the limits and realized she could get past any gatekeeper, she started to want the actual money herself.

By the time she was 18, Tanya had ‘confiscated’ some $40 million in cash and commodities from US banks, using hacked wire transfers. It didn’t take long before the FBI was on her tail. But when interviewing her, they made clear that they were using her to get to the person actually running things – clearly, she wasn’t smart enough to do this on her own (Black people she was told, rob people, they don’t hack computers).

Thus began a cat and mouse game with the authorities that would drive her to unthinkable limits, breaking the hearts of her parents, putting Tanya’s life in jeopardy, and costing her custody of two children before finally sending her to Federal prison (where she escaped twice) with the longest sentence ever given for a white-collar crime.

In the spirit of true crime narratives like Catch Me If You Can, Molly’s Game, and Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House, Never Saw Me Coming is a gripping caper, but it’s also the deeply personal journey of a young Black woman finding her way in a world that underestimated her brilliance.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother’s Quest for Vengeance – Azam Ahmed

Fear Is Just a Word begins on an international bridge between Mexico and the United States, as fifty-six-year-old Miriam Rodríguez stalks one of the men she believes was involved in the murder of her daughter Karen. He is her target number eleven, a member of the drug cartel that has terrorized and controlled what was once Miriam’s quiet hometown of San Fernando, Mexico, almost one hundred miles from the U.S. border. Having dyed her hair red as a disguise, Miriam watches, waits, and then orchestrates the arrest of this man, exacting her own version of justice.

Woven into this deeply researched, moving account is the story of how cartels built their power in Mexico, escalated the use of violence, and kidnapped and murdered tens of thousands. Karen was just one of the many people who disappeared, and Miriam, a brilliant, strategic, and fearless woman, begged for help from the authorities and paid ransom money she could not afford in hopes of saving her daughter. When that failed, she decided that “fear is just a word,” and began a crusade to track down Karen’s killers and to help other victimized families in their search for justice.

What do people do when their country and the peaceful town where they have grown up become unrecognizable, suddenly places of violence and fear? Azam Ahmed takes us into the grieving of a country and a family to tell the mesmerizing story of a brave and brilliant woman determined to find out what happened to her daughter, and to see that the criminals who murdered her were punished. Fear Is Just a Word is an unforgettable and moving portrait of a woman, a town, and a country, and of what can happen when violent forces leave people to seek justice on their own.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World – Yepoka Yeebo

When Ghana won its independence from Britain in 1957, it instantly became a target for home-grown opportunists and rapacious Western interests determined to snatch any assets that colonialism hadn’t already stripped. A CIA-funded military junta ousted the new nation’s inspiring president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of hiding the country’s gold overseas.

Into this big lie stepped one of history’s most charismatic scammers, a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty in Ghana and trained in the United States, John Ackah Blay-Miezah declared himself custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece–if only you would “invest” in Blay-Miezah’s fictitious efforts to release the equally fictitious fund. Over the 1970s and ‘80s, he and his accomplices―including Ghanaian state officials and Nixon’s former attorney general–scammed hundreds of millions of dollars out of thousands of believers. Blay-Miezah lived in luxury, deceiving Philadelphia lawyers, London financiers, and Seoul businessmen alike, all while eluding his FBI pursuers. American prosecutors called his scam “one of the most fascinating–and lucrative–in modern history.”

In Anansi’s Gold , Yepoka Yeebo chases Blay-Miezah’s ever-wilder trail and discovers, at long last, what really happened to Ghana’s missing wealth. She unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements, international finance, and postcolonial betrayal, revealing how what we call “history” writes itself into being, one lie at a time.