2 arrested in $60K international Troup County church scam

We understand that police have arrested a man for running a church scam. Our Doug Evans has been digging into this story. And Doug, I understand that this scam was more or roughly $60,000 and the arrest didn't even happen here in Georgia. That's right, Ariel. Good afternoon. A church here in Troup County is out $60,000, a considerable sum. two men are now under arrest. The church may not get its money back, Ariel, but at least they may get some justice. Two men and authorities here in Troup County are calling this an international scam. They say the men duped the church by faking some emails that looked like emails from a company that the church had been doing business with. Turns out the address to those emails was just oh so slightly off and the money that they were sending wasn't going to the person that they thought it was. Let's talk to the Troup County Sheriff's Office or hear from them about how the scam worked and then I'm going to tell you about the arrests. We identified the two individuals and the first one was taken into custody in November 22nd of 2025 and we knew there was a second individual out there and he was taken into custody recently on October 5th 2026 and what they did they were manipulating emails manipulating accounts where this church had a relationship with a previous organization and the church legitimately thought they were sending funds to this legitimate organization and what these two individuals were doing they were creating other accounts and the money was being deposited in there and they were able to take that and actually make cash transactions from ATM machines so they thought the church thought that they were depositing money with people they've done business with before correct it was other organizations and what they did they basically just manipulated these emails and it could be like one letter off and a lot of times if you're consistently doing stuff with an email you're familiar with you may not recognize that and they didn't and of course this took place over time and then they started noticing where it wasn't going and they contacted us and our team just did an incredible job of tracking them down there's the long arm of the law and i guess when you defraud a church a long arm of someone else might be in play uh Usman Diaby he was the one that was arrested in Newark at the Newark airport flying into the country from Ghana snatched him there and he is under arrest and has been brought back here to Troop County to face charges. Again, five counts of identity theft, money laundering, theft by deception, writing a deceptive commercial email. The other fellow, he was arrested back in 2025 when this scam was first reported to Troup County authorities. His name is Samuel Opoku. So two men under arrest. The sad news in all of this is that the church is out that $60,000, dollars, but at least they might get some justice here A lot of times when we report these stories with scams, we're not often able to say that people were arrested or held responsible for them. So the fact that these two arrests have been made is good news in that regard, but absolutely, you got to feel for the church who is missing a considerable amount of money. Yeah, too bad for them. You're right about this, especially with the international connection to this scam a lot of departments would probably look at this scratch their head and say we don't have the resources. Apparently Troup County does put an investigator on it and within a year and a half or so they have made two arrests in the case so they are very excited about that at the Troup County Sheriff's Office understandably so because these arrests are very very rare, see again later this evening as you continue to dig into it.