Hello, my name is Vanessa. I’m  calling from Houston. I think   we are both pregnant for the same  man.

What? His name is Dere Fasola. I want to ask you something before we begin.

Have  you ever looked at someone, someone you trusted completely, someone you built your life around,  someone you carried a child for and realized in one single moment that you never knew them  at all?

His name was Dare Fasola. And Dere had a gift. Dere gift was this. He could look a woman  directly in her eyes, hold her face in his hands, and lie to her so completely, so warmly,  so convincingly that she would leave that conversation feeling loved.

There was a woman  in Lagos named Kemi. She was carrying his child. She believed he was in America working, building  their future, sending money home when he could, waiting for the right time to bring her over.

And there was a woman in Houston, Texas named Vanessa. She was also carrying his child.

She believed he had left Nigeria permanently, that she was his fresh start, that he was done  with his old life and ready to build something real with her in America.

Both women pregnant at  the same time. Both women believing they were the only one.

Both women also missing money. Before  we go on, take a second to support the story, like the video, hit subscribe, and drop a  comment telling me where you’re watching from.

I’d love to see this African story bring people  together from every corner of the world.

Write your country below. Let’s see just how far this  story can travel. And before this section ends, I will tell you exactly how much money Dere stole.

Not from one woman, from both of them combined. The number will shock you. Stay with me.

Dere  Fasah was 31 years old when this story begins. He was from Ibadon originally, second son of a  middle-class family, good school, some university, the kind of upbringing that gave him enough  polish to move through the world convincingly, but not enough foundation to stay honest in it.

He  was handsome. That is relevant. Not in an obvious way in the way that some men are handsome where  you only notice it after they have already started talking to you.

After the warmth has already  come through, after you are already comfortable, he had been doing small business, import export,  the kind of vague commerce that sounds credible and is almost impossible to verify.

Phones,  electronics, small consignments moving between Lagos and various places. Enough cash flow to live  decently.

Not enough to live the way he wanted to. Dere had expensive taste and a modest income.

That  combination, my people, is where most of these stories begin. He met Kea Deayo in 2018.

Kemi was  28, an accountant at a midsize firm in Victoria Island. Precise, careful, organized, the kind  of woman who color codes her calendar and keeps receipts for everything.

She was not naive. She  was not inexperienced. She was simply in love with a man who had studied how to be loved back.

Dere pursued Kem with the kind of focus that makes a woman feel like the most important person in  any room.

He remembered everything she told him. He showed up when he said he would. He met her  parents.

He attended her cousin’s wedding in Abeokuta and danced with her aunties and said all the right  things.

By 2019, they were serious. By early 2020, Kemi was pregnant. Dare received the news with  what appeared to be joy.

This is our beginning, he told her. I am going to build something for  us.

I have a business opportunity in America. I just need 6 months. 6 months and I will come  back with enough to set us up properly.

Kimmy believed him. Of course, she believed him. He had  given her no reason not to.

She used her savings, 350,000 naira that she had kept for years in a  fixed deposit account to support his travel.

Visa fees, he said, flight, initial accommodation  just to get established. She transferred it. He left for Houston in March 2020.

He called her  every day for the first two weeks. Now let me tell you about Vanessa.

Vanessa Clark was 29 years old. She had been born in Houston to Nigerian parents.

Her father from Delta State, her mother American. She worked in healthcare administration. She had an apartment in Plandand, a sensible car, a good  job and a phone that Dere Fashola had gotten hold of at a Nigerian community event in Houston  3 months before he ever boarded that flight.

Yes. 3 months before he left Lagos, De had already  been building the Houston side.

He had been video calling Vanessa while Kemi was in the next room. He had told Vanessa, “I am coming to settle in America permanently.

Nigeria is behind me. I want  to build something real with you here in a place where there is actually a future.”

Vanessa who had  heard too many stories of Nigerian men who came abroad and disappeared back to secret families  had been careful.

But Dere was patient. He was consistent. He said the right things about  commitment and building and being done with his old life.

By the time he landed in Houston,  Vanessa was at the airport to pick him up.

By June 2020, Vanessa was also pregnant. Two women, two  pregnancies, one man on a video call with one of them while sitting in the other one’s apartment.

And neither woman, not Kemi in Lagos, not Vanessa in Houston, knew the other one existed.

They had  a system. He told Kemi that American Network made calling unreliable to always WhatsApp first before  calling.

This meant he controlled when their conversations happened. He told Vanessa that he  had ongoing business obligations in Nigeria that required occasional late calls, time difference.

This explained any moments she might overhear. He opened a separate email for each life.

He kept two  phones, one American number, one Nigerian number with international roaming. He had a story ready  for every question before the question was asked.

And money, money was the engine of the whole  machine. He borrowed from Kemi. Investment capital, he called it.

He would pay back double when the  deal closed. He borrowed from Vanessa. Emergency cash flow, he called it.

Just while the paperwork  for his American business account processed, he paid Vanessa’s money back twice.

With Kemi’s money  so Vanessa would trust him with larger amounts. He paid Kemi back once with a portion of what Vanessa  had given him so Chem would feel secure sending more.

My people, this was not impulsive. This was  not a man who made a mistake.

This was a man who had been running this system version by version  his entire adult life.

Chem was not his first. Vanessa was not his first. We will come back to  that.

But first, let me tell you the exact amount both women lost. Kem 350,000 naira sent before he  left.

420,000 naira sent in installments over 8 months. That is 770,000 naira at the exchange rate  of the time approximately $2,000 American.

Vanessa in three separate transfers $11,500 American  total stolen from two women carrying his children $13,500 American.

This was not a struggling man  borrowing out of desperation. This was a man running a financial operation on the backs of two  pregnant women with a system so refined it had its own accounting logic.

Chem was born in November  2020. She named him Oluadasimi, meaning God has done something good for me.

She called him Dara. She sent Dara photos from the hospital. He sent back a voice note, emotional, warm, proud, saying  he would be there soon, that the deal was almost done, that everything was coming together.

He  was lying. He was sitting in Vanessa’s apartment when he sent that voice note.

Vanessa’s daughter  was born in January 2021. At this point, Dere had been in Houston for 10 months.

He had told Kem  repeatedly that visa complications and business timing were delaying his return.

He had told  Vanessa repeatedly that his Nigerian obligations, property, paperwork, needed more time to fully  close.

Both women, each with a newborn, exhausted, emotional, dependent, believed him because that  is what exhaustion does.

It makes trust feel like survival. The coat. It was a Tuesday afternoon  in February 2021.

Vanessa was doing laundry. She picked up a coat there had worn to a meeting the  week before.

She checked the pockets the way you check pockets before washing. In the left pocket,  a receipt from a Western Union branch in Houston.

A transfer receipt to a name Vanessa did not  recognize. She almost ignored it. Money transfer receipts were not unusual.

Dare moved money back  and forth between Nigeria and America frequently. He had explained this many times, but something  made her look again.

The amount on the receipt was not small and the name kemi A with a Lagos account  number.

Vanessa sat down on the edge of the bed with the receipt in her hand.

She went into Dere’s  WhatsApp. She knew his passcode. He had given it to her himself 6 months ago as a gesture of trust.

My people, even his manipulation had layers. And she searched the name. There was no kemi in his  WhatsApp.

But there was a contact saved as K Legos office. She opened it. The chat was long, very  long.

The messages were not about any office. Vanessa read for 40 minutes. She read about Kemi.

She read about a pregnancy. She read about a baby named Dara. She read voice note transcripts  and saw photographs.

A woman and a newborn child that carried Dere’s face so clearly it could  not be argued with.

She read the money requests, the transfer confirmations, the promises, and she  recognized word for word promises he had made to her the same sentences.

Copy and pasted from one  woman’s life to the other. Vanessa did not call there.

She called Kemi. Kemi picked up on the  second ring. She said, “Hello.” Vanessa said, “My name is Vanessa.

I am in Houston. I think we  need to talk about dear Fola. There are moments in a person’s life where time slows down.

Where  the mind understands something before the heart is ready. Kemi sat very still. Who are you?

She  said quietly. I am the mother of his daughter. Vanessa said he has been living with me since  March 2020.

And I think I think he has been lying to both of us. The silence on the line lasted 11  seconds.

Kemi counted them later. She did not know why. She just remembered counting. And then she  said in a voice so calm it frightened even her, “Tell me everything.”

They talked for 3 hours. By  the end of the first hour, they had confirmed the timeline.

By the end of the second hour, they had  confirmed the money. By the end of the third hour, they had a plan.

These were not women who fell  apart. Kemi was an accountant. She dealt in facts, figures, documentation.

Vanessa worked in  healthcare administration. She dealt in records, systems, procedure. Between the two of them, they  had bank transfer records, WhatsApp screenshots, voice notes, video call logs, receipts, and  two birth certificates with the same father’s name.

They built a file. My people, they built a  file so complete, so organized, so devastatingly thorough that when De came home that evening and  found both of them sitting in his living room, he had no words.

Not one word. The man who had  a story prepared for every question before the question was asked sat down and said nothing.

Pause here for just a moment. If this story is doing something to you right now, if your jaw has  dropped, if you are feeling something, share this video right now without finishing it because  somebody on your contact list is dating a dere fasa right now and does not know it yet.

Share  it. You might be saving someone. Like this video, subscribe and let us finish this story.

I said  Dere had done this before. Dere’s first mistake in that living room was underestimating both of  them.

He tried the story he always tried first. Confusion, misdirection. Vanessa, this is not what  it looks like.

Kemi placed the file on the table. She said, “We are not here to argue.

We are here  because we have already made our decisions. We just wanted you to know that we know.

Dear looked  at the file, he looked at Vanessa. He looked at Kemi. And for perhaps the first time in his adult  life, Dear Fola had nothing to say.

What happened over the following 3 months, Vanessa consulted  an attorney in Houston. The next morning, Kemi filed a police report with the Economic and  Financial Crimes Commission, the EFCC in Lagos, documenting the transfers, the false pretenses,  the fraud.

Together, they began pulling threats. And when they pulled, more things unraveled. The woman before Kemi was a woman named Tolu, Lagos 2016 to 2018.

She had sent dear 600,000  naira over the course of their relationship. Also described as investment also never returned.

The  woman before Tulu was a woman in Benin city who had sent him 300,000 naira for a visa that never  existed for a trip she never took.

Each woman isolated. Each woman thinking she was the only  one. Each woman too ashamed or too uncertain to go to the authorities alone.

But together together  they were a pattern and a pattern documented, dated, cross referenced across 5 years and  two countries is not a domestic dispute.

It is wire fraud. It is obtaining money under false  pretenses. It is a federal matter on the American side and a criminal matter on the Nigerian side  simultaneously.

Dere was arrested in Houston in May 2021, not by one authority, by a coordination  between the Houston Police Department Financial Crimes Unit working from Vanessa’s attorney’s  filing and a concurrent EFCC warrant that had been communicated through international legal  channels coordinated in part by Kemi from Lagos.

Two countries, two women, one coordinated arrest. He was taken from the apartment, the apartment Vanessa had paid for with part of the money he had  convinced her to transfer to his business account in handcuffs on a Tuesday morning.

While both his  children were still asleep in separate countries, he did not resist. There was nothing left to say.

When the full financial accounting was done across all the women across 5 years across two countries  the total amount de Fasah had stolen was in excess of $45,000 American $45,000 there was sentenced  to 4 years in an American federal facility.

The EFCC case in Nigeria ran concurrently. Additional charges waiting for him on return. He would not be free for a very long time.

And  Kemi and Vanessa, these two women who had every reason to be enemies, who had been placed in  competition by a man who needed them never to meet, became something neither of them  expected.

Not friends. Exactly. Something more specific than that. They became the people  who understood the only two people in the world who understood exactly what the other had been  through because they had been through it at the same time in parallel in the same story.

Vanessa  flew to Lagos in December 2021. She had never been to Nigeria before. Dear had always found a reason  to prevent it.

Kemi met her at the airport with Dara on her hip. Vanessa came off the plane with  her daughter.

The two children, a boy and a girl, born two months apart, sharing a father they would  grow up not knowing, looked at each other with the uncomplicated curiosity that only small children  have.

And Kem and Vanessa stood in that arrival hall and laughed. Not the kind of laughing that  means something is funny.

The kind of laughing that means we survived, we are still standing and  we did it together.

If this story did something to you today, if you felt something watching  this, I need you to do three things right now.

One like this video because this story needs  to travel because there is a dare fascin stories that will make you think.

Stories  that will make you feel. Stories that will remind you that justice, even when it is slow,  always arrives.

Three, share this video with every woman in your life who deserves to know  what this looks like, not to frighten them, to arm them.

And in the comments, tell me this. Have you or someone you know ever encountered a person running two lives at the same time?

How did it come out? Tell me your story. I read every comment and tell me where in the  world you are watching from tonight because   this is an African story.

But dear,  Fasola does not only live in Nigeria.