Last year , Abu received this random Facebook message: “My name is Jeff from Kuala

Lumpur. I need some assistance from you. Business or financial assistance that will
help empower me.”No one likes Internet scammers, Abu included. So the 21-year-old
marketer from Sabah,insincerely responded, “How can I help?”“I wanted to see how
this whole scam operation worked and how they bait people,” Abu explains. “I just
wanted to go down this rabbit hole and see what are the tricks that they use to get
people.”

But there’s no way he could have guessed what would happen next. Jeff was indeed in
Kuala Lumpur, and he proposed a business partnership. He asked Abu to mail some
used electronics to an address in Kuala Lumpur. Supposedly the electronics would be
resold and the profits split between the two of them.“I looked the place up on Google
Earth,” Abu says. “There were broken-down cars all over the place.” He wrote back to
Jeff and told him he was skeptical. Willie insisted he would never take advantage of
someone.

Abu didn’t buy it, and he replied with a small lie of his own. “I figured the more time of
theirs that I can waste, the less time that they’d have to spend ripping me or other people
off.”He told Jeff he owned a photography business and could use some pretty
pictures.“How about a nice Kuala Lumpur sunset?” Abu asked.Was Abu planning on
paying for the photos? Jeff wanted to know.“If they’re good, sure,” Abu said.Jeff
wasted no time. He snapped a couple of sunset photos on his old dinosaur flip phone
and sent them to Abu’s phone the next day.“I told him, ‘Hey, this is great,’ ” Abu says.
Another fib—he wasn’t even sure it was a sunset in the photos.Ali said he could take
better pictures if he had a better camera. Abu decided to play along and see what
happened. So he picked up the cheapest camera he could find—a shiny red one—and
shipped it off to Liberia. The postage cost as much as the camera. And now Abu was
really invested in this—whatever it was. “My family thinks I’m crazy because I’m
interacting with this guy in Kuala Lumpur,” he says.

Still skeptical, Abu said he’d like to see 20 shots of life in Kuala Lumpur. A week later,
a bunch more blurry photos came through on his phone.“Jeff has to be the worst
photographer on the planet,” Abu said in a YouTube video he made chronicling his
adventures. By now, he had realized something interesting was happening and decided
to document it.When Abu wrote back, he shared some advice for taking better -
pictures—hold the camera steady, for one thing. The next batch of Jeff’s photos came a
few days later and contained about 20 more shots of people doing everyday things:
walking in town, tinkering on their houses (some of which could only generously be
described as shacks). For Abu, the images were heartbreaking. He had never seen such
poverty. But their quality was much better—which posed a big problem.“When he put
in the work, I thought, Oh no, now I’ve got to figure out a way to compensate Jeff for
these pictures, or I’m going to be the scammer,” Abu says.He decided to make a
booklet using the pictures, calling it By D Grace of God, a phrase borrowed from Jeff’s
messages. Then Abu took to YouTube, where a few thousand people had started to
follow his dispatches, and to the crowdfunding site indiegogo.com, where he figured
he’d sell a few copies of the 16-page booklet, featuring a dozen of Jeff’s Kuala Lumpur
photos, for $8 a pop. Sales exploded.Abu set aside his doubt and distrust, and then he
did something else he never could have imagined a few months earlier: He traveled
1,011 miles to Kuala Lumpur. He wanted to confront the man who’d tried to scam him,
although confront probably isn’t the right word.

As for Jeff, he says he’s changed too. Although he still has to support his wife and kids
on what many Malaysian spend at Starbucks, he says he’s OK using much of the money
to help others. In fact, he says the opportunity to be charitable may be the best thing to
come from all this.“I used to receive,” Jeff says. “I’m the one who’s giving now, and
it’s better to give than to always receive.”Did he ever consider keeping the $500? No,
he says. “It’s stealing. And that would be dishonest. When you are truthful, when you
are honest, you can come from nobody to somebody. I have come from zero to
hero.”Abu has already been back to Sabah, and he says he plans to keep going, to keep
helping. Because, as he says, “when you give someone a chance, sometimes they’re not
who you thought they were. Sometimes they surprise you. And sometimes you end up
being the answer to their prayers.”