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The Denver Broncos may have just ended their regular season and are getting set to hire a new head coach, but they had an unexpected surprise last week when news came out that some scumbag guy has been lying to women in the Denver area about being a player on the team — and that he defrauded one woman out of more than $100,000. What the hell is wrong with some people?
According to a police report, a man named James Otis Turner was arrested last Friday, December 28 after the defrauded woman came forward, with charges including felony theft, identity theft, forgery of checks, and fraud by criminal impersonation. But that’s not where the story ends, because, in an unrelated incident in October of last year, the same guy was arrested for sexual assault of a woman who also alleges the man claimed to be a Denver Broncos player. Following the investigation, more women came forward and said Turner falsified his identity as an NFL player.
Authorities are still unsure how Turner was able to convince one victim to pay him the $100,000, but police said his scheme was “crafty” for being able to finagle that much cash from someone.
Going under the name Dante Sir Foster — which is similar to a current NFL free agent named Donte Foster, who most recently played for the Minnesota Vikings — the perpetrator is believed to have even created multiple, since-deleted websites with fake information about his persona to help convince his victims, per the New York Post. Here are some examples of the posts.
Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants, Arizona Cardinals, and the Pittsburgh Steelers were first to show interest and eventually landed with the Minnesota Vikings for the 2011-2012 season,” one post read. “Unfortunately, due to injury he was unable to play after injuries which brought his season abruptly to an end.”
Another blog from March 2017 identified Turner as Dante Sir Foster and teased the prospect of seeing his “familiar face” around Minneapolis during the team’s upcoming “spring training camp,” which typically starts in mid-July. But as the earlier blog alluded, Turner’s budding career was beset by injuries.
“Dante’s career has been action packed and nothing short of exciting while he has been playing professional football internationally thus far into his career,” the website reads. “Unfortunate, and far too common, injuries have temporarily relocated him back to Texas most recently.”
People like this are F’in sick, so here’s to the jackass being caught. It’s one thing to lie about your persona as a joke and then reveal who you are, it’s another thing entirely when you go to great lengths to try to convince others that you’re someone you’re not. This isn’t make believeland, dude.
While police aren’t sure how many women fell victim to this guy’s lie, according to police spokesman Joe Cybert, via the New York Post, he’s “hoping this will prompt women who did not realize, or did not report that they were a victim of this guy, to come forward.”