Nest-egg to nightmare: Facebook scammer John Sinclair swindles $284k from victims

Tanya Cousins and Rick Mason were scammed out of $36000 and are now having to live in a house bus.A Facebook Marketplace scammer who swindled his victims out of $284,000 using 15 different pseudonyms won’t have to pay a cent of the money he stole back. Hazel Osborne reports.Rick Mason and Tanya Cousins thought their prayers had been answered when they saw a self-contained unit for sale on Facebook.The Whakatāne couple had recently sold their home to become mortgage free as both moved into early retirement due to illnesses.When the sale of the house went through faster than anticipated, they bought a house bus to tide them over until something more permanent stood out.A few months later a self-contained unit with an asking price of $36,000 popped up on Facebook Marketplace. It was listed by a woman called Deborah McKinley and was just what they were after.What the couple didn’t know at the time was that McKinley was just one of 15 different aliases for John Sinclair – a man now on home detention after scamming 28 victims out of $284,000 to fuel his gambling addiction.Court documents reveal Mason and Cousins paid for the unit in April 2021 with two…
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