Hernandez never explained how he obtained this email address.
In it, Hernandez wrote: “If you recall, we previously spoke in August 2021 and most recently in June 2025 regarding your concerns about Mr. Kelvin Blas and the situation you described involving the hardship he is experiencing.”
He spoke to William Torrance on June 12, 2025, the officer who was covering for Carlos Hernandez, the regular country officer responsible for Togo.
By claiming “we previously spoke… most recently in June 2025,” Hernandez wasn’t fabricating contact. He was taking credit for Torrance’s twenty-three-minute dismissal.
This reveals something far more damning than bureaucratic sloppiness or individual error: The “romance scam” script is institutionalized policy.
A temp officer conducted a twenty-three-minute phone call and reached the same conclusion that had been reached in 2020, 2021, and would be reaffirmed in October 2025.
They didn’t investigate. They followed Hernandez’s script.
“The Department of State has reviewed the information you provided and have indications that you are a victim of a scam.”
The letter urged Burger to report the scam to the FTC and FBI. It recommended he “cease communication” with Kelvin.
It closed by assuring Burger that the U.S. Embassy in Lomé was “available to help all U.S. citizens in need of assistance, such as helping them contact family or friends, or repatriation assistance to return to the United States.”
But the “romance scam” script didn’t begin in June 2025, or even in 2021.
It began in February 2020, one month before Ambassador Stromayer’s racist statement, as the bureaucratic justification that would replace overt discrimination.
The Script: February 2020
Before Stromayer told Kelvin “Americans aren’t Black,” the groundwork was already being laid for a different narrative.
Brian Sells, then Consular Section Chief at the U.S. Embassy in Lomé, Togo, sent David Burger an email on February 21, 2020. Sells, who holds an MPP/JD from the University of Chicago and has a background in civil rights law, claimed that documents Burger had provided were fraudulent, and he knew this because of grammar errors indicating “third-party” involvement.
Here’s what Sells wrote:
“Yes, it is fake, and we know this because we’ve seen similar fake documents before and the fraudster who created this document left all sorts of typos in the document.
For example, the perpetrator wrote: ‘I, Jessica Clark have (instead of “has”) come to an agreement (we don’t say this in standard English – we say, “agree”) with Kelvin Blas today (missing a comma) January 30th (should not have “th”), 2020 (missing a comma) to allow him (missing “to”) leave the US Military Base Camp Phoenix’
If you don’t want to believe me or call me, that’s fine, but you will need to contact your local police or FBI office (for being such grammar police he should have put a comma here) if you have already sent your hard-earned money to West African organized crime syndicates. I am sorry that we could not convince you, but maybe someone else in the United States can. Please stop will (this should have been with not “will”) all further email inquiries, as my staff and I will no longer respond.”
Let’s review Sells’ own grammar:
- “office(for being” — missing space after period
- “Please stop will all further” — should be “with,” not “will”
- Multiple comma errors identical to those he criticized in the document he was analyzing
Brian Sells, a civil rights attorney with advanced degrees from the University of Chicago, used his own grammatical incompetence as evidence that a stranded American veteran was fake.
And then he stopped responding.
One month later, when Kelvin showed up at the embassy in person, Ambassador Stromayer would tell him “Americans aren’t Black” and threaten him with security removal.
The “romance scam” narrative and the racist exclusion weren’t contradictory. They were complementary. One provided the bureaucratic justification. The other revealed the underlying motivation.