A gem of a fraud
Brett Jolly, the obscure businessman who made an unlikely claim, some months ago, to have found a green stone, which at 7 000 carats could be the world’s largest diamond — twice as large as the Cullinan, and 150 times the largest green diamond ever found — is whining. He has reportedly asked the National Prosecuting Authority to investigate a fraud case against his business partners. He’s also suing for R300 000 in civil court, since this is what he claims to have spent on the unlikely caper, before the stone was even superficially examined by someone who had actually seen real diamonds before.
Turns out the “stone” wasn’t plastic, as I surmised, but resin. I’m not sure you really want to go to court to show you were gullible enough to believe such an exceedingly unlikely story, and have questions asked about how the stone got photographed in a convenient office when Jolly’s original claim was the photo was taken en route from the mine to a vault in Johannesburg, but then, I didn’t bet R300 000 on this tall tale.
shame man. I once had a boyfriend who told me that a ring was an opal - embarrassingly I believed him. Some years later I found the ring in a drawer and realised that it was CLEARLY made of resin. Worse - the ’silver’ wasn’t even close to being a precious metal. Sometimes our desire to believe in something is stronger than our ability to see what is in front of us.