Hoaxer Scores With Latest Phony Lawsuit

MARCH 17--For the umpteenth time, felonious hoaxer Jonathan Lee Riches has duped the media with one of his phony lawsuits, this time pretending to be the Uber driver charged with murdering six victims during a shooting spree last month in Michigan.

Reporters unfamiliar with Riches’s oeuvre reported this week that Jason Brian Dalton, 45, had filed a $10 million civil rights lawsuit against Uber. The company, the lawsuit charged, “treats their drivers like crap” and “discriminated against [Dalton’s] mental health.”

The handwritten two-page complaint accused Uber of causing Dalton “psychological damage” and claimed that, “I busted my butt for them. They gave me no Christmas bonus, I wasn't invited to any corporate parties, they made me work when I was sick and didn't let me spend time with my 2 children.”

The purported Dalton lawsuit was mailed to the U.S. District Court in Detroit, where it was docketed Tuesday. Oddly, local reporters did not take notice of the fact that the envelope in which the lawsuit was mailed carried a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania postmark.

Dalton (seen below) is locked up in the Kalamazoo County Jail on murder charges. Riches is pictured above.

A TSG examination of the phony Dalton complaint reveals that the handwriting on the document is identical to that seen on numerous prior hoax lawsuits filed across the country by Riches, whose escapades have been chronicled in these pages for a decade.

When he first began filing his phony lawsuits, Riches would list himself as the plaintiff. But when federal courts across the country became wise to his antics, Riches switched up his routine and began impersonating public figures and notorious defendants. Riches was so successful in duping the rubes at TMZ that his Facebook page listed his occupation as a “Creative Writer” for the gossip web site.

While Riches has been imprisoned for much of the past ten years, he has not let his incarceration stand in the way of his hoaxes. Many of his recent scam filings have emerged from the state prison in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.

According to Bureau of Prisons records, Riches will be released from federal custody on May 10. He has been serving the final months of his sentence in a halfway house in--surprise, surprise--Philadelphia, from which the bogus Dalton lawsuit was mailed last week.

Though freedom is weeks away, Riches is apparently incapable of ceasing his fraudulent activity. Especially since he knows there are always new journalists to dupe. (3 pages)