I'm just not sure

I have been chatting with a man who claims to be from New Jersey. But his IP tracks to Sunnyvale. His Sister's does too and she claims to be from Colorado. He doesn't follow the regular criteria. He is Divorced not Widowed. He claims to have a Son 13. He says he is a jewelry designer that has been divorced for 6 years. He has never asked me for anything but says he was scammed and wants to go to Ghana to recover his $23,000 that he sent to a scammer. I finally got a phone number out of him. He says it is his office phone. It turns out to be Casper, Wy. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Sunnyvale is yahoo's headquarters. If you have pulled the correct IP address from the headers and are getting Sunnyvale, I'm guessing you will find NNFMP somewhere in the headers. This is often, though not always, another indicator of a scammer.

While widowed is more common, plenty of romance scammers pretend to be divorced too. Usually the reason for the divorce will be chosen to make them look like innocent victims (the top reason they give is that their wife cheated on them, often with their boss/best friend/family member, second is that she was a drug addict/alcoholic/unfit mother).

Claiming to have a teenage son is very typical scammer. Scammers posing as males will usually have 1 or 2 children, while their female characters often have none.

Traveling to Ghana is a BIG sign of a scammer. Claiming to be a scam victim has also been used before--the idea behind this is that the scammer wants to look innocent and vulnerable, and sadly, many victims will fall for this--they believe that he can't be a scammer if he was scammed himself!

Based on the info so far, I can't say absolutely, but odds of a scammer are high. If you can post the first few emails he sent, we can probably tell you for certain.