Emmanuel Jack, a convicted romance fraudster who sweet-talked his way into almost £200,000 (approximately Ksh 33,235,200) of lonely hearts’ cash, just pulled off his biggest escape yet—dodging deportation back to Nigeria! And guess what? Love saved the day.
Let’s rewind: Back in the early 2010s, Jack wasn’t just juggling dating profiles—he was juggling identities!
Mr. Jack came to Britain in 1997 and was granted indefinite leave to remain. He went on to become a business student at the University of Salford.
However, between 2011 and 2012, he targeted ‘lonely’ women in the UK and in the USA, working with a co-offender to carry out the fraudulent campaign.
He used aliases including John Creed, John Windsor and Johnnie Carlo Rissi to persuade women to send him money. After his arrest and before his conviction, Mr Jack successfully applied for British citizenship.
Posing as an architect (fancy, right?), he lured six vulnerable women into sending him stacks of cash. When the law finally caught up with him, he was sentenced to three years in prison in 2014.
In 2022, the Home Office ruled that he should be sent back to Nigeria, the country he left with his parents when he was 10. But Jack wasn’t about to go down without a fight! He made a last minute attempt to avoid going back home by launching an appeal.
And lady luck smiled upon the Nigerian romeo conman. An immigration and asylum tribunal in London ruled in his favour, stating that deportation would be unduly harsh on Mr. Jack’s British wife and children, who suffer from complex medical issues and are reliant on his care.
Tribunal judges Victor Rae-Reeves and Luke Bulpitt heard that his wife has medical issues arising from pregnancy.
His 18-month-old son, who was born prematurely, has serious development issues that requires close supervision and specialist care, while his six-year-old daughter suffers from eyesight problems, the tribunal was told.
Mr. Jack wife has a 16-year-old daughter from a previous relationship for whom he also provides care, the tribunal heard. The daughter outlined the ‘huge role’ Mr Jack plays in her life in a letter, where she suggested ‘the family would fall apart without him’.
The judges agreed that uprooting the family would be a medical nightmare, ruling that sending Jack to Nigeria would be “unduly harsh.”
They cited the difficulty of securing specialist treatment in Nigeria and declared that the family’s deep emotional bond made deportation an unfair burden.
So, despite his dodgy past, Jack gets to stay! The man who once scammed women out of their savings now finds himself saved—by love, family, and a well-argued legal battle.
