Friends and longtime readers know about the the Warsaw Incident, in which a swindler from Kroonstad, South America convinced me and roughly a dozen other people from every continent to relocate to Poland, ostensibly to start a new international school. Though we had teachers, students, and a building, the school was a total fabrication. If you don’t know the story, I’m told it’s a darned good read. 

That was 2018 and with the the tumultuous years we’ve had since then, I don’t give Warsaw much thought anymore. Nor do I think much about what I now consider my past life as an international educator. Friends and family saw the glamorous Instagram version of that life, complete with airport lounge access, fine international hotels, and exotic locales, but the reality was 15 years of constant scurrying: scrambling for the next contract, packing bags, moving, moving, moving. None of my overseas contracts were as bizarre or disruptive as the Warsaw Incident, but a few came close. I’ve written about that life at length, and my reasons for leaving. For now, I very intentionally live in the present with my wife and my house and the the salty air of a small coastal town where very little ever happens, wrapped in a Pendleton blanket, sipping hot black coffee on cold winter days. 

Yet sometimes the ghosts of my past pay a visit. In the years after the International School of Warsaw shut its gates, this writer received a steady stream of correspondence from readers who reported sightings and updates of Riaan Diedericks, the Kroonstad Conman. 

Most of them are hapless saps like myself who got taken in by Riaan’s hijinks and hope to warn others of the dangers this man poses. One reader shared a website for another fake school that Riaan was reportedly opening, this time in his home town of Kroonstad and sponsored by a company called Linomtha. It was such a hot mess of a website, clearly this was another half-baked sham from Riaan. I wrote a scathing analysis of the website and figured at the least, my shitpost Pulitzer-worthy exposé would create one more data point on the Grand Algorithm of Things, making the world a little more aware of Riaan and fraudsters like him.

Not long after I published that chapter, someone took down the fake school’s fake website, but stories of Riaan kept rolling in, each more unbelievable than the last, so it’s come time to revisit the subject of Riaan and his sloppy, sweaty saga of criminality that defies logic and never seems to end.

By November 2019, I was in Milan, Italy, a few months into what would be my final year of teaching abroad. Out of the blue, a commenter on my blog shared links he thought might be helpful, should I wish to further research Riaan’s latest doings. There was a South African news article about the school that read like a blatant fluff piece, full of information that ran contrary to much of what the now-404’d fake school website claimed. There was also a Facebook page for the alleged CEO of Linomtha, but it was so sparse of detail, I had to dismiss it as another one of Riaan’s fictional characters. After all, he’d gone to audacious lengths to persuade everyone the International School of Warsaw was legitimate. He lied to government regulators, hired (but never paid) entire teams of lawyers to convince teachers we were working legally, and forged countless documents, including the school charter itself. How hard could it be to release a PR bubble to some local McNews website and build a fake social media account? For a sociopath like Riaan, it would be a normal Tuesday afternoon. There was nothing in the new information that seemed worth pursuing further, but it was interesting to see the efforts Riaan made to legitimize his illegitimate operation. 

Months passed. It was now February 2020 and at that point the world thought the Australia wildfires would be the worst news of the year. Remember that? Remember the Australia wildfires? Yeah, some other things happened that year that also sucked. 

One thing that happened that did not suck, a random DM hit my WordPress inbox.This guy wants to know everything I know about Riaan. Everything. I set up a call. 

This guy, let’s call him Jimmy Hoffa, he runs a transportation enterprise in South Africa. Apparently, Riaan sold him a fleet of trucks. I’m thinking, the trucks were the wrong brand, or the trucks were in poor working order. No, the problem was that Jimmy never received the trucks because the trucks were never real. Bigger problem, Jimmy’s money is real, and Riaan has Jimmy’s money. Added bonus: when Jimmy called Riaan to inquire about the information he read on this blog, Riaan claimed I was a neurotic “estranged son” of his, intent on destroying his good name. 

So I’m very happy to tell Jimmy everything. I told him about the schools, teachers, students, parents, investors, and so on, all the people that Riaan conned from Vietnam to China to Mongolia to Poland to who knows where else. I tell him about the unfathomable amounts of cash he made disappear. I tell him about how he ran a scam similar to this one, where he helped teachers purchase new cars, cars the teachers would later learn were in fact rentals. Seemed now Riaan was fishing bigger fish, fish like Jimmy. 

Now that Jimmy was up to speed, I asked what his next move would be. Call the cops? 

“Oh yeah, I’ve called the cops,” he replied. “They’re meeting me at his house. I’m on my way there right now.” 

At this point, we’d been on the phone quite some time. How big is Kroonstad exactly? 

“Kroonstad? That’s clear across the country. I’ve been driving for about… five hours. I’m gonna make sure this problem is taken care of.”

He added, “I’ll be sure to film it for you too.” 

Ending the call, I was absolutely gobsmacked. It takes a sick mind to become a film flam man, and a sicker mind to scam teachers, students, and schools. You’d have to be flat stupid to rob a South African trucking magnate. Is Jimmy about to, to quote the Irishman, paint Riaan’s walls? 

Moreover, between the ghost truck deal and the business with Linomtha, it seemed that Riaan was violating the first rule of crime: when committing crime, don’t commit more than one crime at a time. How many plates did this man have spinning, exactly?

To answer that, we’re just getting warmed up, but this is not a heartwarming romp, à la Catch Me if You Can. It’s more of an anemic, anticlimactic piss puddle, à la Leaving Las Vegas. 

Jimmy Hoffa sent the promised video. Shot from the window of his moving car, we see Riaan in his front yard in an unwashed sleeveless t-shirt, menacingly waving a bat yet scared shitless. The voice behind the camera is shouting, “Where’s my money, Riaan? Where is it?” Next video, police cruisers have arrived. Then I get a text from Jimmy: WE GOT THE BASTARD. 

Incredible. Riaan had been a ghost for over a year, and in this span of 12 hours, the universe gave me a virtual front row seat to his arrest. I couldn’t help but send Riaan a text of my own, using the number he’d published to the Linomtha fake school website: WISHING YOU WELL, DAD. 

Jimmy agreed to keep me updated on my dad’s trial. 

Later that month, the entire world crapped itself. We wanted to believe the new bug in China would be a low-level bird flu or something similar. China shut down, followed by the Asia-Pacific region. Turned out, I had picked the biggest bummer of a year to accept a contract in Milan, Italy. 

Now confined to my small apartment in a foreign country, adjusting to life under lockdown (the European version where people actually had to stay indoors), and doom-scrolling the latest buffoonery of my home government as they mismanaged the crisis in America, I was excited to see an incoming call from Jimmy Hoffa, but I’d soon be disappointed. 

This conversation was much shorter than the last. The police had taken Riaan into custody. Unfortunately the pandemic brought their already crippled justice system to a standstill. His trial would be delayed indefinitely and in the meantime, he was back on the streets. 2020 was sure turning out to be a shitty year, because at this point, Riaan lived a freer life than me. 

“Free” is a relative concept though. Reader testimonials continued to pour in and they painted a portrait of a desperate man who further limited his finances, mobility, and options with every convoluted caper. 

Put yourself in his nasty shoes for a moment. Imagine you’re a con man, not a particularly talented one. You’ve committed crimes in so many countries, you likely won’t be able to board an international flight ever again, so you’re stuck in your home town, a town that probably remembers what a piece of shit you were as a young man. Now you’re old, people still hate you, but now for more reasons than before. You also have a wife and teenage daughter, who by now must be awfully sick of your lies and the incessant changes of address. You could try to make amends or at least try for a fresh start. Instead you continue to run small time, ill-planned escapades, all which fail, and with each failure, your world grows smaller, as do your accommodations. 

The home I saw in Jimmy’s video was a nice suburban residence with green grass and an iron fence and a sad, frightened man wielding a Louisville slugger. Late spring of 2020, I hear from a couple that’s been trying to evict him from their AirBnB, where’s he had stayed for some weeks without payment. At first, out of sympathy for his wife and child, they allowed him some grace. (So we fully understand what garbage this man is, I must reiterate that he’s committed all these crimes with his family in tow.) Riaan presented the couple with fraudulent proof of payment, and because — again — he’s incapable of committing just one crime at a time, the couple later catches him breaking into their store, so their grace ran dry.

Some of us learned to read sheet music or bake sourdough bread in quarantine; Riaan amassed compounding criminal indictments. The couple told me that, apparently no longer satisfied with selling imaginary trucks, Riaan had invented a trucking company. This company doesn’t have trucks, but for a substantial fee, they’ll deliver empty promises to their customers.

Riaan had reportedly also created a new fake company. How many fake companies are we up to now? This one was in the business of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Among the customers they targeted: the United Nations. Because why not? If you’re going to take criminal advantage of the world’s worst health crisis in 100 years, may as well go big.

Probably the weirdest con that readers reported was a phone battery that charges itself with vibrations from the user’s voice. Google declined to invest.

The couple with the AirBnB pressed charges but in a bizarre reverse-Uno-card move, they say Riaan falsely accused them of assault and attempted to make a legal case for squatter rights. A glorious moment for my 2020, this blog was submitted as courts evidence. The judge laughed off Riaan’s counter-charges and the couple won their case, but say that sadly they were drained significant sums of money from missed rent, lawyers, and the inability to lease their property while the matter was tied up in court. Riaan was convicted and this time not granted bail, so his accommodations became smaller still. In November 2020, after a long wait for the wheels of justice to creak forward, he was booked into Soweto’s Sun City Prison, which looks roughly equivalent to New York’s Rikers Island. 

One week later, Riaan was released from prison but awaited a new court date for mid-December of 2020. Unclear if he made that date or not. A sensible criminal would consider doing less crimes at this point, maybe even stop doing crimes altogether.

Flash forward to May 2021, a reader reports that he fell victim to Riaan’s PPE scam. Another reports that Riaan has some kind of new job and lives in a posh golf course suburb between Johannesburg and Pretoria. That did not last – I’m told it ended with another eviction.  

In August 2021, yet another reader reports falling victim to an eight-month-long scam in which Riaan attempted to sell “a stockpile of chrome” that did not belong to him, and consequently was arrested once again. Riaan’s family would be evicted from yet another residence as he’d failed to pay rent. In one reader’s words, “He is broke and thrives on sympathy and handouts while he scams you.” 

Since cracking back into the Riaan files, more and more odd claims and accusations have floated to the top of the toilet water, but they’ll require some verification and for now, my faith in humanity is diminished enough for one sitting. To wrap up on this drunken stagger of a story, or at least this chapter of it, I will conclude with the email I received from Riaan himself. This was sometime in Spring 2022. He writes: “Hi, I’m in New York now. On my way to Portland to meet with you. Can we meet next week or should I stop by [name of my employer at that time]?” 

I didn’t live in Portland then and I don’t now. I have no reason to believe he was actually in New York or anywhere in the northern hemisphere for that matter. His message had the same naiveté as that overseas friend with no awareness of American geography who plans to visit the USA for the first time, and their itinerary puts them at the Statue of Liberty on day one, the Grand Canyon on day two, Hollywood on day three, and so on. 

I don’t care much for veiled threats, and I was having quite a nice day, so I left it alone and didn’t respond. Should go without saying, he did not visit my office. Unlikely he made it to Portland, but I like to imagine him lurking around Pioneer Square with a 3×5 glossy, asking random strangers if they know me. 

Perhaps I should feel grateful in a way to Riaan. He torpedoed my career trajectory and did similar or worse damage to everyone else who was involved with that school. Yet if it weren’t for that, I might have never left a career that was grinding me down. I might have missed out on the life I enjoy today with my wife and our quiet days on the beach.

In any case, I cannot help but remain curious. What’s this guy up to now, in 2023? Did he ever get his come-uppins? Is he still scamming people, or is he dead in a quarry somewhere? 

This is where I’ll leave it for now, but if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s unlikely this will be the last piece I write about Riaan Diedericks.