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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-...ks-australian-to-smuggle-herion-shoes/6675566From email scam victim to heroin smuggler: Donald Clay's cautionary tale
Updated yesterday at 8:42pmWed 5 Aug 2015, 8:42pm
Donald Clay, aged 58 and with no criminal record, was arrested at Sydney airport in June last year after being duped by a Nigerian email scam.
"I came, picked up my bags, they [Customs] pulled me out for a check and started going through my bags," Mr Clay said.
"As soon as the dogs came and sat on that bag I ... my heart went right through my throat because I know what a drug dog does and man, he just sat immediately on that bag."
Inside Mr Clay's bag Customs officers found shoes from the Philippines stuffed with more than a kilogram of heroin.
In recorded interviews with the Australian Federal Police (AFP), obtained by the ABC's 7.30 program, Mr Clay lays out an elaborate story of how he had more than $80,000 stolen in a Nigerian email scam.
Emails seized by the AFP show he was contacted years later by a man offering compensation: an all-expenses paid trip to the Philippines and Australia to collect a "long-overdue payment" that would make him a multi-millionaire.
"He passed himself off as an official for the CBN Bank, the Central Bank of Nigeria and we'd had many negotiations over I would say two years," Mr Clay said.
"They were going to give me a large sum of money: $10.5 million.
"They were going to walk me through, take me to the bank, help me get a bank account.
"So then, when I get to the Philippines, that's when he hit me up with this: you give them a gift, so what I'm going to do I'm going to get shoes and you give those to the officials.
"I wanted to believe so bad that common sense left me.
"Why someone would do this to somebody who has a family and whose life has been destroyed enough, now you're going to put me in harm's way by making me a heroin trafficker?"
After a year in an Australian jail, Mr Clay is back at his home in Indonesia.
Two months ago after a trial, he was released and deported when a jury accepted his incredible tale and found him not guilty of drug smuggling.
Mr Clay has been forced to sell off his family's belongings. The scammers have bled him dry.
"This has destroyed my life. They're just cowards," he said.
"They get innocent people to do their dirty work for them, you know.
"I mean, this is a new type of crime that's just you know, there's too many people out there that are trusting and, you know, want to do good by people and then they do this to them."
