People I trusted let me down – Abdul Hayi Moomen speaks 6 years after interviewing fraudster

Renowned Ghanaian broadcast journalist, Abdul Hayi Moomen, has opened up on his infamous interview with Fauster Atta-Mensah, a scammer of extraordinary talent who managed to be interviewed on GTV in 2014. Mr Moomen revealed that the fearless and knowledgeable fraudster had a chance to be on the Moomen Tonight show because trustworthy people had vouched for his credibility.

He added that even though people he had absolute trust in had told him that Fauster Atta-Mensah was truly who he had claimed to be- a Scientist who had won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to Science – he still searched for him online and had found amazing stories about him in supposed genuine websites.

Unknown to him, these sites were actually cloned to and made the imposter appear as real at a single search on google.

So he proceeded with the interview. Little did he know he was talking to a sophisticated fraudster had not been to space and who had made no contributions at all to Science.

After the show, Moomen was ridiculed and even insulted for not doing due diligence before conducting the interview on such a national platform. They relied on a sixteen-minute video that had gone viral on social media.

But Moomen, in an interview with Solomon on the TalkToSolomon programme monitored by MyNewsGh.com, wondered why people relied solely on a 16-minute video to chastise and berate and mock him when they know the interview lasted for an hour.

He revealed that the fraud of Fauster Atta Mensah was exposed in the show and if people had tarried a bit, they would have realised that the fraudster got exposed before the end of the show.

The award-winning journalist is especially peeved that his colleague journalists were rather the ones who attacked him most when they should have known better.

But he admitted that the unfortunate incident has helped him improve considerably as a journalist: he is now more thorough with his work and takes no chances.

“One Senior person at GBC walked to me and said have you heard about this guy? We even interviewed him earlier today but we didn’t get the kind of response from the public that we wanted, I think that your show is good enough to host this person and this is a very Senior person and I can’t just brush him off. So I told him that we had done production for that night and he looked at the synopsis and said this programme is timeless so why don’t you go ahead and do this one so tomorrow you can reschedule the programme you were going to run today.

"Put this guy on today otherwise, the other media houses will get him and then we will lose that advantage. So I said no problem then right after that the producer of the show himself walks in and I said boss is trying to change our agenda. There and then the producer said I know him and that we lived in the same area. I just got off the phone with his mother and she said she had heard we wanted to interview him and that she didn’t want us asking him questions bordering on politics. This is a producer saying I know this guy personally and he’s that good and we grew up together. So that alone, if you were in my shoes you will believe it.

“So we went ahead and started the interview. In fact, I was instructed that when you go on air don’t edit the profile we’ve given you because we are proud of this guy. I could tell from their eyes that they were genuine because they didn’t know the guy was fake. “I’m not putting blame on them or anybody and this is the first time I’m publicly speaking on this issue. I’ve never put the blame on them or anybody because when I host shows produced by producers and the praise come I take the praise.”

Watch the full interview here: