I was informed of 'fraudster' Fauster Attah Mensah’s interview few minutes to time – Moomen reveals

Broadcast Journalist with the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), Abdul Hayi Moomen has for the first time spoken on his infamous interview with the fraudster, Fauster Atta Mensah.

Moomen became subject of trolls and insults after his interview with Fauster Atta Mensah who in 2014 claimed to have won a Nobel Prize for his supposed excellence in Science.

Although the interview exposed Fauster Atta Mensah because the incoherence during the interview gave him out as a fraud, Moomen was not spared by especially colleague Journalists who thought he should have done a background check.

But speaking in an interview monitored by MyNewsGh.com, Abdul Hayi Moomen said he was told of the interview by a trusted Senior Colleague while he and his team were preparing for another interview.

Apart from the Senior Colleague, the producer of the show had also confirmed that he knew Fauster because they grew up in the same area and that he had spoken with his mother about the interview with the State Broadcaster.

Moomen said he also did his checks on Google and found articles written on Fauster Attah Mensah by Aljazeera and CNN which were unknowing to him from cloned websites created by Attah Mensah to make his story look true.

He said while conducting the interview, he punched a lot of loopholes in Fauster Attah Mensah’s story and even gave the supposed Nobel Award winner up was the claim that he had received a Diploma from the Adisadel College when Secondary Schools at the time were issuing certificates.

Abdul Hayi Moomen said after he realized that he had been played because of his limited knowledge in IT, he organized training sessions for the people at GBC and brought in resource persons to help broaden their knowledge.

“That interview marked a turning point in my journalism career. I didn’t know Fauster and I don’t even know if that indeed is his real name because it is turning out that the same personality has gotten a new name for himself and is doing other things out there in the name of the UN and other global Associations and deceiving a lot of people. In fact a lot of people have gotten in touch with me after they realized they had been duped by him to find out if I knew but since that infamous interview I’ve not come across him anywhere.”

“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."

“But beyond that what hurts me is when the thing became public, it went viral and Ghanaians insulted me. I’ve nothing when people criticize me but to insinuate that I’m so stupid that common google, then A Plus, some of your own colleagues at where you work and fellow Journalists took me on because they said so he couldn’t even google? The first thing every Journalism Student will do is to google. But I googled in spite of the fact that people I trusted had walked to me and said this guy is genuine, I googled. I am not an expert at IT and I believe that many Ghanaians will not spot a fake website when they see one. So I googled Fauster Attah Mensah and then Aljazeera pops up and then there are stories about him on Aljazeera. In fact there is even a video, a recording, a studio recording in Aljazeera studios with him, then CNN website had done an exclusive story on him. It only turned out that these sites were cloned websites. The guy is an IT expert who knows how to do these things. I was not in a position to tell that these websites were cloned.”

“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.”

“I don’t go to the public and say that it was Kwadwo who did the production so instead of saying Momeen well done, say Kwadwo well done. So If something has gone wrong, I took the blame. When we went on air, one thing led to the other. I read the entire profile and that’s what people saw and started lambasting me. But the question I ask is, for all those criticizing me, they were criticizing me based on the fact that I didn’t do enough background checks but I ask them, what is the length of the video you watched? and how did the video end? My show is a one-hour show, what you saw is a sixteen minutes video. If you’re as critical as you want me to be, you should be asking where is the rest of the tape? how did the interview end? these are the questions that an intelligent person will ask but those so-called intelligent people who were criticizing me failed to ask themselves where’s the rest of the video and how did the video end? they didn’t do that because increasingly as he was answering my questions, I began to see gaps, holes, inconsistencies.”

“At the beginning, he said he had a Diploma from Adisadel but didn’t strike me but later in the interview then I said Adisadel is a Senior High School and he said he competed in 1999, I completed SSS in 1998 and I took a certificate so that was when the follow-up questions came in and so the interview ended in a way that he was not excited. He left without saying goodbye to me.”