An innocent abroad
The mother. The online relationship. The scam that’s destroying lives. This is how vulnerable Australians are being lured into carrying illegal drugs for a powerful international cartel.
“It’s you or nothing. Just as simple as that,” a man who called himself Precious Max told Yoshe Taylor in an online message. “I hope you have eaten hon,” he said in another. He worried about whether the Queensland teacher and single mother was sleeping. “You have a busy day in the morning,” he reminded her.
The messages that flew between the two through 2013 were intense, detailed, loving.
Around the same time, the Cambodian-based fraudster was sending similar messages to a Melbourne woman, who only wants to be identified by the pseudonym Kay Smith.
“Hello love, just wanted to say goodnight and sweet dreams … love you so much and forever,” he wrote one night. On another occasion he told her he was at the orphanage where he helped out. “The kids here are asking when I will bring my wife too. Almost cried.”
Messages (Supplied)
Neither woman was aware of the other’s existence. Both thought Precious Max was a sweet and loving South African-born businessman. Both had met Precious Max through the social and dating network, Tagged, when they were in highly vulnerable states. Kay, a single woman who lived in suburban Melbourne, had never been in a long-term relationship. She had just emerged from a bruising encounter with “a serial dater”. She didn’t have regular work.
Yoshe, a tall woman with beautiful blue eyes and a gap-toothed smile, had been seriously depressed. Her relationship with her partner had fallen apart and her job as a primary school teacher in the small town of Esk, midway between Brisbane and Toowoomba, had ended. She was struggling to pay her mortgage.
Yoshe Taylor and her two children, Archer and Kahlyla, in happier times. (Supplied)
A friend suggested it was time she tried to meet someone. “I had been all by myself for a long time, four years, just me and the kids,” says Yoshe in An Innocent Abroad, the first episode in ABC Australian Story’s new season.
On Tagged, Yoshe started to meet and talk to people from all over the world. And then she found herself in conversation with Precious Max.
He told her about his volunteer work at an orphanage in Phnom Penh. She was fascinated because she loved children and working with children.
“I was talking to him for a long time; I thought I got to know him and he seemed very nice,” says Yoshe, who told him about the things that mattered to her, including loyalty and honesty. “I am proud of my honesty, most humans aren’t,” she wrote in one message.
But the seemingly caring messages would come to an end. By Christmas 2013, an innocent Yoshe, then 41, was distraught, locked up in a Cambodian jail and facing charges of international drug smuggling. Meanwhile, Kay, then 44, was sitting in a maximum-security detention centre in Melbourne’s outer west. She had unwittingly returned from her first trip to Cambodia to meet Precious Max with 2 kilograms of heroin concealed in the lining of two laptop bags.
‘I had no hope’
Precious Max was messaging both Kay Smith and Yoshe Taylor in a bid to gain their trust. (Supplied)
Yoshe and Kay both fell prey to an international drug smuggling syndicate targeting vulnerable women and men through online dating sites. Precious Max worked for the syndicate grooming potential drug mules.
Kay spent six months in the Dame Phyllis Frost women’s prison and then 18 months on bail before the charges against her were dropped.
Yoshe’s journey was cripplingly longer: she spent six years in a Cambodian jail, battling health issues, desperately missing her children, and seemingly forgotten by everyone, except her family and friends.
“I knew I wasn’t important so I didn’t think anyone would do anything to help me,” she says now. “I was a mushroom, I didn’t know what was going on.”
Speaking publicly for the first time since her release and return to Australia in May, Yoshe tells Australian Story she’s sharing her story as a warning to others — if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
“If one person is protected because they’ve seen the story, if it can save one other Australian, I’ll be really happy,” she says.
For the first few days after Yoshe was detained at the Phnom Penh airport she had no idea what to do. “I asked for a lawyer because of watching American television crime shows.” She was given a list of lawyers but didn’t know how to choose the right one.
Yoshe was sent to the notorious Prey Sar Prison where she shared a cell with 99 other women. There were sleeping platforms on each side, but it was so overcrowded that most women were forced to sleep spooned up against each other along a central aisle.
There were three toilet bowls at one end of the room. “No wall, no curtains, no plumbing. They’re just toilet bowls on the floor.”
Three weeks later she moved to a smaller prison where conditions improved slightly.
Yoshe’s children were still young when she was arrested; Kahlyla, then 11, and Archer, then 6.
“Shortly after she was arrested, she called us and it was really sad,” Kahlyla says. “Archer and I cried and she cried, she was telling us she loves us and hopes she sees us soon. And it was pretty sad, especially because we never got a call after that.”
Archer and Kahlyla didn’t see their mother for almost six years. (Australian Story: Belinda Hawkins)
Kahlyla Young. (Australian Story: Belinda Hawkins)
By April 2014 as Yoshe’s trial loomed, she had only met her lawyer once. She had a translator beside her as witnesses gave evidence during the trial, but on the day of the verdict she had no one interpreting for her. It was an hour or so before someone told her she would spend the next 23 years in a Cambodian jail.
In the days after the verdict, she stopped eating. Photographs taken during her time in jail show an angular face etched with pain.
“I didn’t feel hungry, I didn’t feel anything.
