Courtesy of HuffPost BlackVoices
A promising lead about the whereabouts of Phoenix Coldon turned out to be a cruel hoax, causing the missing Missouri woman’s family additional pain, their entire life savings and their home.
“Unfortunately, we will now be losing our family home,” the missing woman’s mother, Goldia Coldon, told The Huffington Post. “We have tried to explain the situation to our mortgage company but they don’t care.”
A tip that led the family to Texas came from a man who claimed to know Coldon’s whereabouts and provided her family with very convincing details, Goldia Coldon said. The family already had invested much of their money to search for Phoenix, she said, but spent the remainder of their savings on private investigators to follow up on the lead. It was not until after the family’s money was gone that the man who provided the tip admitted he fabricated the story, Coldon said.
“They said he made it up to get attention,” she said. “It cost us dearly and it led absolutely nowhere. It was just his idea of a joke.”