Onijah Andrew Robinson has been appearing in multiple news reports and social media posts in the past few days. She came from the US to marry a young man in Karachi, Pakistan. As it turns out, he didn’t want her, and she was left alone to wander around in Karachi with an expired Tourist Visa. Apparently, she is on her way to the US now but it is unclear who helped her.
The case of Onijah Andrew Robinson, the 33 year old New Yorker, who came to see her teenage online boyfriend, is a textbook romantic scam.
These kinds of scams are now infesting the western hemisphere. Older women are typically the target. Some of them are recently divorced, widowed or empty nesters but everyone is lonely. They either have some form of income or savings. These women also struggle to find spouses in real life and approach dating apps to explore wider dating pools. However, the people they sometimes meet are scammers based in Africa or South Asia, who attempt to extract every single cent they can before vanishing in thin air with complete impunity. Women have been forced into a life of poverty, lost houses and in more extreme cases, even died. Men also become targets of romantic scams but the numbers are lower.
The man Onijah was visiting was the 19-year-old Nidal Ahmed Memon. He has been reluctant to come on camera.
Onijah reached Karachi in October, and it was in January that she was discovered by the media. Nidal Ahmed Memon told her that he won’t be getting married to her because his family didn’t agree.
The focus has been on Onijah, who looks visibly disturbed. She seems delusional and some of her statements have brough her international fame. Social media is now flooded with video clips of her asking for $2,000 per week or land for developing real estate projects. A man who claims to be her son and identifies himself as Jeremiah Robinson says that she has the bipolar disorder.
Unfortunately, it is easy to make fun of a woman who is lonely and struggling in her personal life, and harder to question how she ended up in this heavily televised mess
The media has been flocking to her for days now. The press conferences, her trip to McDonalds and visuals of her putting on makeup started a meme fest. However, this is beyond cruel. Someone should have intervened and stopped the media from recording her. At least the coverage of her could have been nuanced.
Many years ago, a young Pakistani girl claimed she was President Donald Trump’s daughter.
She received a lot of coverage and became a meme too. No one questioned her mental and emotional well-being, as should have been the case. Yet, the reporters in those bizarre press conferences continued to cross-question her and pushed her to delve deeper into this claim.
In Onijah’s case, the young man she was interacting with has been absent. Not much has been said about his communication with her, what platform they used and how these interactions unfolded. If you listen to Onijah closely, it is obvious she has her own emotional struggles and doesn’t come across very reasonable in her conversations.
But why was this young man messaging a woman nearly 15 years his senior and mother of a grown son? She is said to have four children and is possibly divorced. Did he think she will help him financially or that this will be one of those unions on paper that will lead to a green card and possibly some green cash? Everyone taking jabs at this woman should first question this young man and how society finds it acceptable for men to lure or entice women as a means to another end. Clearly, he never thought this to be a life-long and stable relationship. How many other Pakistani men and women are hunting for middle aged or older spouses online to immigrate abroad and get settled?
Unfortunately, it is easy to make fun of a woman who is lonely and struggling in her personal life, and harder to question how she ended up in this heavily televised mess. Why did this young man and his family allow this woman to be on the streets in an unsafe city like Karachi? This is not to say that she would have been safe in any other city in Pakistan. And what did he say to her that led her to believe they are engaged or that she should fly thousands of miles away from home?
No one using her clips for entertainment on TikTok has questioned the kind of disappointment she must be experiencing right now or the sheer toll this trip had taken on her. When this man and his family moved out of his house and locked it to escape her – she was there waiting for him for 30 hours. Yes, 30 hours. It is not clear if she ate or slept in that time.
Ironically, all this unfolded days before Valentine’s Day, the day for love. Love is rare but intensely desirable and love is based on trust. This woman placed her trust on a man who then betrayed her. We need to talk about how deceptive and cruel this situation is. And above all, we need to talk to everyone around us about romance scam. Most matches will now be made online, internationally and in Pakistan too. We need to train ourselves and our loved ones to not misplace our trust. And we need to talk about not using these mediums to catfish emotionally desperate individuals and exploit them for something other than love. There is a need to understand how online identities can be verified and what safety measures can we take before we become serious with someone online. Although this was an extreme case, the internet is full of cautionary tales where people start losing their hard-earned money or time to someone much younger and faraway. Instead of making fun of someone in love, we need to discuss how we can stop this exploitation and develop a code of ethics for these interactions.
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