Online scam artists are some of the worst kinds of thieves out there. Not only do they steal money from their victims but they leave them emotionally scarred.
A 64-year-old woman is warning others not to fall victim to the charms of online Romeo scammers like she did.
Patricia Meister from Queensland, Australia was swindled out of $100,000 through Facebook. It all started when she received a friend request from an Italian/Scottish businessman named Carlos who took some interest in her.
“I’d never been on dating websites, and I only used Facebook for business,” she told Daily Mail. “So when I got the friend request, I thought it couldn’t do any harm, can it?”
Well, it did $100,000 worth of harm because her online Italian lover was actually a Nigerian scam artist. After accepting the friend request the two started talking and sharing personal details about their life.
“Carlos,” which isn’t even an Italian name (the Italian version would be Carlo), eventually started to charm and woo her.
“We started chatting. He was charming, smart and educated. He was very good with English and he was very romantic,” she admits. “I was very much in love with him at one stage.”
Eventually, the two began speaking over the phone and that’s when Meister she started to become suspicious because his accent was curious to her.
Her heart was too caught up in it at this point and she just decided to ignore it. About eight weeks into the relationship he asked if she could lend him $600 since his credit card wouldn’t work while he was in Malaysia for a project.
She became even more suspicious since his story sounded odd but she again ignored her instincts.
He continued asking for money and she continued sending it, $7,000 here and another $7,000 there.
He did have an elaborate ruse with a lawyer talking in the background and an excuse that the large wire transfer wouldn’t go through and that a courier would have to deliver the cash.
She was given a link to a website with a tracking sheet so she could track the delivery. Her parcel kept incurring enormous fees of more than $25,000 and kept paying them.
She got a call saying he got into a terrible car accident and needed the money for medical fees but at that point, she had already given him her last dollar.
“I couldn’t pay him anymore and I even told him I wasn’t going to send him any more money,” she says. “Shortly after that, he made a ‘miraculous recovery’ but I’d stopped talking to him by then.”
Police told her it was too late to recover her $100,000 at that point. The last message she received from him said: “Catch me if you can, my dear.”
“I guess at the time, I was going through a period in my life where I felt isolated,” she says. “I know I’ll never get my money back but all you can do is raise awareness. There’s a lot of lonely people out there, the dating websites are riddled with scammers.”
Scam artists have very sophisticated operations going on and they are like full-fledged businesses.
“There is not just one person,” Queensland Police Fraud Prevention Officer Kathryn Collins said, according to Now to Love. “There is a whole network of people working in the background and they won’t stop until they get your money.”
