Long posting about the dangers of “online” relationships. You don’t have to use a dating site for scams to be attempted.
I sell online on various internet platforms and in 2012 I had just begun on a new one in the USA. Dean, (one of my US customers) had bought a few expensive pieces and we began to chat online two or three times a week. We had many things in common seemingly, a love of antiques, interior design, science fiction, art and so on.
We exchanged photos. However when he wanted to chat face to face I said no. I had recently come out of a long term relationship and didn’t want to become involved again just yet. So I backed off and said “lets just keep it a casual online friendship” He appeared to agree but every so often he would seem to be moving in a bit too close again, and I backed off.
Dean presented himself as owning a “prop hire” company and being a freelance stylist to the likes of film, TV and theater companies, interior decorators, etc. However gradually be introduced a new topic of conversation. It seemed his mom was in poor health and needed an expensive operation. Meanwhile the hospital bills were racking up. This raised a red flag with me. You don’t discuss your financial worries with a casual friend on the internet. I saw, or thought I saw, where this was going.
So I began to distance myself by changing the subject whenever the expensive hospital bills came up. Or I cut short the conversation and made out that I was busy with my shops. I also, with some regret, cut down the frequency of our chats to one or two a week.
One day he said to me “You don’t know how lucky you are to live in a country with free health service. Here if you can’t pay you get left to die like my mom”. I realised I was being groomed to feel guilty. I told him that our health service is not free because its paid for out of taxes. All working adults have to contribute whether they need to use it or not, so its certainly not free.
April came along, a month when I used to close all my shops and travel in Europe to buy new stock. In an effort to distance myself still further I told him I was going on a business trip to Europe and as I would be on the road, there was no guarantee we would be able to talk. So I guess it was going to be “a few weeks” before we spoke next. My intention was to let him down gently and not contact him again for a few weeks. Hopefully he would by then have found a way of solving his financial problem with his mom’s illness.
At that point he came right out and asked me to wire him $50,000 to help pay for his moms operation. I was shocked. “I don’t have that kind of money” “Well you’ve got over $$$$ of stock sitting in your shop!” I was so angry that he had been adding up my net worth in this manner. Of course money invested in stock is not the same as money you can quickly realise to lend out. Any competent business person would know that. Just because someone has a nice house, a flashy car, and expensive stock does not mean they have ready cash sitting in the bank. At that time I was still renting and didnt even own a car.
I told him this. I asked for details of what the operation was, but he skirted around my questions. He sounded more interested in how much money I could wire him than his mom’s actual condition. I told him that the bank would not simply allow me to wire a large sum of money abroad just like that. We had strict money laundering laws.
“Well how much do you think you can let me have?”
“Ill speak to my accountant tomorrow and see what I can do”.
That was the last time we ever spoke.
After I came off the phone I blocked his email address, blocked him from my shop, and set both my landline and mobile to block international calls.
At first I felt guilty. Then I discussed the situation with a relative. I use my own domains for email and he showed me how to block Dean’s email address and IP address as deep server level so that his communications would never even reach my spam file. They would simply bounce back to him with a gobbledegook message.
He asked to see the photograph that Dean has sent me, and showed me how to do a reverse image search on Google. Low and behold. Dean’s picture came up on a number of scam warning sites and in similar contexts. He was not simply called Dean. In fact he used a number of alias names and had scammed several women.
My instincts to back off had been correct, and I had narrowly escaped losing a lot of money to a very clever fraudster.
In the end I decided not to go to the police or take the matter further. I wanted no further involvement with “Dean”. To be truthful, I felt more than a little foolish that I had been taken in. However I did forward my evidence to the owners of the platform where my shop was located. They banned him from the site and sent a generic warning message to all shop owners to “proceed with caution” if contacted by anyone with these characteristics.