The coloring book in the mud: how one fraudster built eight victims

The coloring book in the mud: how one fraudster built eight victims A golden retriever named Biscuit dragged a child's coloring book out of the mud on Gregory Lewis Trail in Ohio on a Tuesday morning in April 2022. Inside the back cover were words in a child's handwriting: "Thank you Miss Crystal. God bless you and Thomas." Tucked in the spine was a Western Union receipt for six hundred dollars sent fourteen months earlier to Ghana. But the book should never have been there-it should have been on another continent. How did a carefully constructed missionary named Thomas Adeyemi convince a 22-year-old early childhood educator to drain her entire savings, and what did that ledger with eight names suggest about how many others had already been victimized? In this episode, we follow Crystal Collins's eighteen-month relationship with a man who didn't exist, the reverse image searches that exposed stolen photographs from a legitimate Ghana charity, and the filing cabinet discovered in Gahanna containing scripts organized by emotional register-urgent/crisis, reassuring/grateful, romantic/personal-along with instructions for voice-modulation software. A fraud prevention analyst named Stanley Myers found the partial street sign visible in the coloring book photograph and traced it to Chadwick Avenue in Columbus, forty-five miles from Crystal's home, raising the question: how many victims were documented in that handwritten ledger, and how long had Rachel Sanders been running this operation before anyone noticed? Person: Crystal Collins Perpetrator: Rachel Sanders Location: Millbrook Township, Ohio Amount stolen: $22,000 (Crystal); $15,000+ (Pickaway County victim); eight victims total Event: Coloring book discovery, April 2022 Date range: October 2020 to April 2022 - Crystal Collins, 22 years old, worked as an early childhood educator at a daycare on Perch Street in Millbrook Township, Ohio. - Thomas Adeyemi first appeared in a Facebook group for Christian educators in fall 2020 and Crystal responded to his post about building a school near Kumasi for flood-displaced children. - Crystal sent forty-one wire transfers between June 2021 and April 2022, totaling just over $22,000 from her "someday fund" and $11,000 borrowed from her sister Patrice. - A coloring book Crystal mailed to Ghana in August 2021 was found in mud on Gregory Lewis Trail in Millbrook on April 4, 2022, containing a Western Union receipt for $600 dated fourteen months prior. - Fraud prevention analyst Stanley Myers reverse-image-searched eleven photographs and found one had been cropped from a Sunrise Forward charity newsletter; he identified the partial street sign in the coloring book photo as Chadwick Avenue in Columbus, forty-five miles from Crystal's home. - A storage unit on Chadwick Avenue rented under a false LLC contained two laptops, three prepaid phones, forty-six issues of Sunrise Forward newsletters spanning three years, and a handwritten ledger with eight names listed by first name and state abbreviation with corresponding dollar amounts. - Rachel Sanders was arrested April 17, 2022; a cellmate recording from May 8, 2022 in Franklin County pretrial detention became her formal confession after plea negotiations collapsed; she was convicted on eleven counts of wire fraud, two counts of identity fraud using Victor Anand's photographs, and one count of theft by deception exceeding $15,000, and sentenced to seven years. To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com. © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved. This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: [email protected].