The story of Artur Samarin a Ukranian high school impostor

A Ukrainian 25-year-old who posed as a high school student to follow his dreams of staying in America and studying at a prestigious university has opened up about the moment his lies caught up with him and his cruel foster parents and co-conspirators turned him over to the cops.

Artur Samarin hit the headlines in 2016 after he was exposed as living under fake name ‘Asher Potts’, and arrested for attempting to fraudulently acquire a US passport and having sex with a minor, 15. 

He was jailed, and later deported back to the Ukraine where he admits he was bitter and angry at the justice system, hinting to GQ magazine he had hacking capability and that ‘it might be nice to see some retribution for how he’d been treated in the American criminal-justice system.’  

‘I wanted Putin to come in and mess stuff up,’ he said of his feelings immediately after his deportation. 

Posing as a student

Artur Samarin (left after his arrest and right) hit the headlines in 2016 after he was exposed as living under fake name ‘Asher Potts’

Samarin has since mellowed and insists all he ever wanted was a chance at a better education.

He was 19 and a sophomore at his local university in Ukraine, when he flew to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as part of the school’s three-month exchange program.

The teen quickly became enamored with the US and dreamed of studying at an American university and graduate school with the ambition of one day joining NASA. 

But he was also shocked at the cost. Most colleges cost ten or 20 times that cost of those in his native Ukraine, and even his job working at the fryer at a Red Robin in Pennsylvania would make little difference to the costs.

As a foreign national, he wasn’t entitled to scholarships to the schools, despite his many academic achievements.

Frustrated and with the clock ticking down to when his visa would expire, it was around this time he met Stephayne McClure-Potts and Michael Potts; a childless couple who he developed a friendship with.

Samarin's lawyers successfully argued there was not enough evidence to prove he stole somebody else's identity in his application to join the citizen's police academy. He filed the application as 'Asher Potts'

Samarin’s lawyers successfully argued there was not enough evidence to prove he stole somebody else’s identity in his application to join the citizen’s police academy. He filed the application as ‘Asher Potts’

He claims the adoption was their idea, although the Potts have always disputed this.

Samarin said he had gone for dinner at their house, in the summer of 2012, they hatched a plan.

The Potts would adopt him on the condition he changed his age from 19 to pretend to be 14, both to allow himself to be adopted, but his new ‘parents’ would also get a  payout from the Social Security Administration and attendant tax benefits.

He says they also asked him to pay $2,000 he had saved over the summer to pay towards the adoption costs. Desperate to stay, Samarin agreed.

Incredibly, when he walked through the halls of Harrisburg High in September that same year, no one batted an eyelid at the 19-year-old man with a thick Ukrainian accent. School staff and students alike accepted his claims he’d been home schooled until that point and grew up ‘in the Russian-Jewish neighborhood down by the river.’ 

Samarin proved to be a talented student, even accounting for the fact he had a five year start on the rest of his classmates. He got straight As, won numerous accolades, was a Color Guard Commander in Navy JROTC and spent his summers the Upward Bound science and math program at Penn State.   

In his sophomore fall, the mayor of Harrisburg named an October Sunday ‘Asher Potts Day.’

Samarin was also getting numerous acceptance letters from universities across America.

But his home life was far from the American Dream.

Samarin claims the plot to pose as a 14-year-old came from his adoptive parents Stephayne McClure-Potts and Michael Potts (pictured in 2016) 

Samarin claims the plot to pose as a 14-year-old came from his adoptive parents Stephayne McClure-Potts and Michael Potts (pictured in 2016) 

Samarin claims he was forced to sleep on a couch in a walk-in closet, ‘probably a little smaller than Harry Potter’s’ and that his delicate immigration status was something Stephayne and Michael would often hold over his head.

He says if he failed to do their laundry, wash their dishes, or cook their meals, they would taunt him, asking, ‘Well, how ’bout we call immigration?’ 

He claims they also used to hit him. 

Samarin added that the couple had seized all his documentation and his passport during the adoption process.

Feeling trapped, he ran away on a number of occasions but said they would always track him down and threatened to go to the police.

Finally, in the winter of his senior year, the situation became too much and Samarin left for real, moving in with a friend’s family.

That was when they called the police, telling them that their adopted son had lied about his age and was threatening to shoot up his high school.  

Stepayne, told FOX 43 in 2016: ‘He made comments about other shootings, and he told us that everyone would know his name. 

‘He said his name would be the biggest in the world. He started talking about certain kids in school he wanted to hurt. He started talking about blowing he school up.

Michael added: ‘We gave him everything we had. We borrowed. We did everything we could to help him.’

Samarin’s attorney, Adam Klein, responded in 2016 that Potts’ parents claims were ‘full of lies.’ Klein added there has been no indication that Samarin had a violent past.

‘Up until the time he was arrested, he was an upstanding student,’ Klein said. ‘She is trying to paint herself as the victim. One would only need to look at her criminal history to see she is a con artist.’

Samarin was arrested, in class, day after the call.

Authorities never found any evidence he had been planning to attack his school. However, they did discover that the ‘high school student’, who by that point was 22 years old, had been dating a 15-year-old girl.  

He was also charged with passport fraud, a federal crime, after applying for a new passport under his new assumed name.

Meanwhile, the Potts were also sentenced for their part in the scheme. Despite their claims that they had always believed that Samarin was 14, Michael received two years of probation and Stephayne, who had previous convictions for fraud, received five months in federal prison and two years of probation, for Social Security fraud and harboring an illegal alien. 

They also denied any allegations of abuse, saying that ‘All we wanted was a child.’

Dressed in a yellow prison jumpsuit, handcuffed and wearing glasses, Samarin 

Dressed in a yellow prison jumpsuit, handcuffed and wearing glasses, Samarin 

‘That was my son,’ she said. ‘But everybody is trying to make it appear that we kept money. For what? Everything we had, we used on this boy.

‘We loved him. I would never ever hurt him. I would never do anything to hurt this boy.’

Meanwhile, Samarin is attempting to settle back into life in the Ukraine, but it appears that a big part of him is still dreaming of one day returning the US.

He says that ‘the police are not America, the government is not America’, unlike his American friends, who still send him care packages and cash.

‘Those friends of mine, they are America for me, and they’re what makes America great. They’re always asking when I’m coming back.’ 

He regrets what he did, more emphatically each day. But he also understands, intellectually at least, why he was treated the way he was. ‘I mean, from geopolitical point of view it makes sense because they have immigration problem, they need to show the world that that’s what they do with immigrants, but it’s sick.’ He knows that he broke the law, he’s sorry, and he feels like he paid for the crime

. But unlike an American citizen, whose debt to society can be repaid and whose misdeeds can be papered over with a redemptive return to society, Artur knows that he will almost certainly never be welcomed back to the United States again—and this is the cloud that seems to follow him around every hour of every day.   

   



Read more at DailyMail.co.uk