WHO IS THE SCAMMER?

I have hired a private investigator to look into the scammer. Based on the information that I have available to me at this moment, the scammer goes by the name Russell Thamer. He has a LinkedIn profile stating that he is employed at GQR Global Markets, a recruitment agency specializing in the healthcare industry in the United States and United Kingdom. Other searches have shown that he has previously had an official email address at GQR. However, he is not currently employed there.

Russell Thamer’s legal name is Wasil Thamer. He was born on April 14, 1993, and his registered address is in NW1, London. It appears that he does not currently live at this address, but that it is owned by his family. He has no birth records in the UK, and it is believed that he was born in either Iraq or Jordan and immigrated to the UK as a child. He went by the name ‘Wasil’ as recently as 2020, but at some point after that, he decided to adopt an Anglicized version of his name. He also shaved his beard and facial hair so that he could present as a white male. He claims to have attended the University of Manchester, and to have previously worked at PWC.

On July 21, 2023, he incorporated a company called Winstonbaines Limited. The company’s website suggests that it is a recruitment agency, which is consistent with his previous employment history.

He has a County Court Judgment dating back to January 15, 2019, under his adopted name Russell Thamer. The case number is E2QZ01TR. He was ordered to pay damages of £8,891. However, that judgment remains unsatisfied.

Wasil/Russell is also a poker player. Despite his claims to have no associations with poker, PokerProLabs shows that he has played in a total of 384 tournaments. His average buy-in was $2.46 and his largest buy-in was $109. The sum total of all his 384 buy-ins was $658.55. His lifetime results are negative, showing a loss of $285.12, and an average ROI of -30.21%.

The Scammer’s Strategy and Tactics

Wasil/Russell’s primary MO is manipulation of evidence. He is an expert at using Photoshop and other digital tools to create screenshots of text messages and e-mails that appear to be genuine. He also frequently cuts and splices genuine text conversations, but takes things out of context and chooses only to present the part of the conversation that attributes the worst possible intentions to the writer.

As an example of how this works, one could have genuinely sent a string of text messages saying:

“Hey Mom. I went to the JFK Presidential Library and Museum today.”

“It was crazy. I can’t believe that this Oswald guy would actually”

“Try to kill the President”

“He’s such a clown”

“To think he could get away with it”

If you just take messages 3 and 4 and crop out the rest of the conversation, you could attribute a very sinister and certainly criminal intention to the writer when his intent was originally completely benign.

Wasil/Russell is an expert at doing this. This technique makes his lies believable because the messages (or voice recordings) can actually be attributed to the person who he is framing.

Furthermore, he is very adept at introducing tension and urgency into a situation. This causes the victim to be separated from their usual logical decision matrix, and forces them to make snap decisions under extreme pressure and duress. Whenever necessary, he inserts a new (and false) development into the overall storyline so as to give the victim the impression that it is a crisis. If he is initially unsuccessful at obtaining money from the victim, he will try instead of get the victim to say something incriminating (even if out of context). He will then use the cutting/splicing technique to make the victim appear guilty, and then use that to blackmail them for money at a later stage.

Assistance

As of now, Wasil Thamer’s whereabouts are unknown. We believe that he is in the Greater London area in the UK. However, he has long since gone underground, and will probably hide even deeper now that he has been exposed. He claims that he is hiding from both “my thugs” and “Wesley’s thugs” - a completely outlandish fantasy that he has concocted.

Wasil Thamer is a criminal. He has committed several crimes, including three counts of fraud and multiple other counts of attempted fraud. He has also committed at least two if not more counts of extortion. He needs to be brought to justice. Even if you ignore the fact that he has subjected both me and Wesley to extremely stressful ordeals, he is still a very dangerous person and could no doubt strike again. Thus, we are appealing to our friends on the internet (especially in the UK) to keep an eye out for him and report him to the police as soon as you have any information of his whereabouts.