Hello and welcome to Slate Money Criminals, a little mini-series on some of the most interesting financial criminals of history.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios.

As ever, I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

Hello.

And Elizabeth Spires of The New York Times and elsewhere.

Hello.

Today we are talking about John Ackabli Meza, who single-handedly skipped around the world, UK, London, Ghana, Korea.

Did he make it to Korea at Yerboka?

He did, yeah.

It was a short trip.

And just swindled people out of millions of dollars.

And this is a wild story.

We are here with the woman who is quite undoubtedly the world's greatest expert on this guy.

Yipoko Yuba, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Introduce yourself.

Who are you?

I'm a writer, and my first book is called Anansi's Gold,

which is the story of John Akblay Mazur and this remarkably strange con.

It's a great title to Anansi, of course, being this sort of central figure in Ghanaian folklore,

who's just this mischievous kind of like spidery type figure, right?

Yeah.

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