Anatomy of a Romance Scam

“heartbreaker” by rouwkema is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“Love is blind,” as Shakespeare said. But 17th Century playwright William Congreve also said, “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

“Clara” is just such a woman. I’ve changed her name to protect her identity, but she’s a 79-year-old Vallejo resident who was taken in by a nefarious Lothario on an online dating site. The result was a loss for her of several thousand dollars and, she says, a credit score that went from the 800s to the 400s seemingly overnight.

Clara is on a fixed income of $650 a month, though she lives in a nice senior apartment complex on Redwood. She says her savings are now depleted.

I first met her outside the Vallejo Police Department, where I had arrived to attempt to get an arrest record for another story I’m working on. As I exited my car, a man outside the car parked in front of me gave me a friendly wave. I waved back and asked how he was doing, joking that maybe he was “not so well” since he was at the police station. He helped a diminutive Filipino woman out of the passenger seat, her body a bit bent over as she pulled out her walker and snapped it into place. The man said he was a retired police officer; I’ve changed his name to Paul.

Paul shook his head and Clara smiled up at me, her eyes bright and animated despite most of her face being covered in a mask. They were there to file a police report, he said, because she had “fallen for” a scammer on a dating site and her bank was not willing to cooperate or perhaps give her some of her money back until she filed a police report. When they found out I was a journalist, they were very interested in telling the story, not only as a warning to others, but perhaps as a way to shine a light on her case in order to help her.

I knew in my gut that such scams are notoriously hard to solve. Culprits use burner phones, VPNs, and anything else at their disposal to remain off the radar of authorities. Then there’s the fact that most of them reside overseas. Still, I offered to try and help. Clara was plucky and instantly likable; she excitedly said that she studied journalism in school.

Once inside the VPD lobby, Clara and Paul described to the clerk what had happened, who told them that an officer would get back to them that day. Indeed, officers were at her house within an hour of her return home. I passed them in the hall of her apartment complex on my way to see her.

“Do you like coffee? I will make coffee and I have cookies. We will be friends!” she said to me on the phone.

Clara made a delicious cup of Peets and handed me a giant Costco box of Oreos. Then she gave me her seven-page statement to the police. Reading it was alarming. She outlined weeks of money transfers and complicated exchanges of gift cards and other financial transactions.

“I unwittingly allowed myself to become a scam victim of fraudster who presented himself to be [let’s call him Phil],'” she wrote. “I met him at Match.com, a date site online. I accuse [Phil] of taking advantage of my emotional attachment by which he used to perpetrate his scam operations on me.”

According to her statement, Phil presented himself as a widower from Copenhagen who had also lost a son. He said he had a girlfriend who turned out to be a junkie and drained his finances. He said he worked in construction and was waiting to be awarded a project completing a sewer line; until then he was broke. He was stationed on a boat in the middle of the ocean in the meantime. Being on a boat, he naturally had bad wifi connections, and could she please complete some wire money transfers for him?

Clara attempted to do so.

“He allowed me to make wire transfers from his bank account with Nardea Bank in Copenhagen,” she wrote. “In making the transactions, the bank would send a code to his phone and he would text me the code. I was successful in doing so.”

Then “Phil” told her that she had somehow caused his Danish bank account to be frozen. The only way to fix it would be for him to go to the bank, but since he was in the middle of nowhere that was impossible. Clara, being a kind albeit naive soul at this point, felt bad that she had “caused” his account to be shut down. He requested that she send him $100 Google Play gift card, then more amounting to $500 in gift cards. He told her that this money would allow him to connect with his godfather, “Reverend Joseph Lassen” in Copenhagen. The good reverend would then loan him $97 K to pay for fees for the sewer pipes he needed. Better still, the money would allow him to be able to come and see her in person. All he needed was a wire payment of $3,000. Clara sent the money through her Citibank account.

In her statement, Clara said she began to be concerned when he never made good on his promise to see her.

“I demanded now that he pay me back,” she wrote.

This is where Phil’s scam really got sophisticated. He paid $3,000, $4,000, and $2,000 to her credit cards. She then made gift car purchases for him in return. The money appeared to have posted on her account, but in fact, in several days they did not actually clear.

“He [used] that ‘2-3 days cleaning period’ to his advantage by showing that he made payments/funding since this payment is posted (assumed to be cleared),” she wrote.

Somehow in all of this Clara also provided Phil with her PIN number and other proprietary information, which she said he used to apply for credit lines.

At this point, Gentle Reader, I’m sure you wondering how in the heck Clara fell for all of this. I tried to find out.

Clara said that this year she made a pact with herself to “go outside the box.”

“That’s me, always looking for adventure in life,” she said.

Clara said she wasn’t particularly “looking for men,” but wanted to try something new. She has a spinal issue that limits her mobility, which has been a hard adjustment for the vivacious go-getter. She has a tremendous sense of humor as well. She said that the entire apartment complex would be atwitter that police came to see her, and the gossip hounds would be chattering. I joked that she should come up with something really good for them, like that she is running a prostitution business out of her flat. At this she exploded in laughter. She certainly would make a wonderful friend or companion for someone. I felt sad that she instead ended up with this jerk. 

Clara also didn’t walk into the situation with her eyes closed. She said that once she informed a girlfriend that she was going to try online dating, she was sternly warned that there are men who prey on elderly widows and she should be very careful. Do not, under any circumstances, give anyone any money. In fact, she shared her email inbox with me, which was sadly peppered with several scammers playing on her emotions. The minute they asked her for money she told them to get lost. So why was Phil different? She didn’t have a good answer.

After reading a handful of the email exchanges, it became clear how these guys operate. They start out with friendly, get-to-know you questions, to which she had witty replies; the men responded positively to her and validated her. They then say they have been thinking of her, then it moves to more romantic talk, even sexual fantasies about her. Then, inevitably, comes the push for cash.

I was dismayed to see that some of the emails were obviously cut and pasted; a pastiche of corny, romantic dross mixed with requests for financial help:

“Hello my sunshine, how are you doing today? See things as they are, not as they could be. Look around, see how lucky we are, fortune is on our side, not fighting against us.Life is a song – sing it. Life is a game – play it. Life is a challenge – meet it. Life is a dream Life is a sacrifice – offer it. Life is love – enjoy it.I want to be the sun that brightens up your life, but I’d rather be the moon that shines down on you in your darkest hours.Kindness in words creates confidence, kindness in thinking creates profoundness, kindness in giving creates love.”,Remember, if you intend to follow the flying of a dragon, be careful, you may hit a mountain in the mist,Every time you cross my mind, I break out in exclamations of thanks to God. I just got to the hotel about an hour ago, Today was not a good day with the machinery company. The fees were beyond my budget believe me sweetheart. if am to use all the cash on me it won’t be enough and i won’t have other money to survive with while here,I am just so tired and stress up today am very worried right now and am in sober mood Love for oneself is the beginning of life-long romance.”,When loving someone never regret what you do. Only regret what you didn’t do.”

I saw emails from at least four men who all used the same language.

While I was perusing the messages, her phone rang.

“It’s him!” she said, referring to Phil. She said he was pushing her to complete yet another transaction and had been calling her all day, unaware that she had gone to the authorities. She answered and put him on speaker phone so I could hear what he had to say.

“Hello darling,” said the voice, cutting immediately to money. “I’m trying to get your account activated.”

Clara pulled out an Oscar-worthy performance, saying she was sick and in bed, with a few forlorn moans thrown in, all the while smiling at me and rolling her eyes.

“Stay strong,” he said. “I need to get your account activated.”

It became apparent to me immediately that the man had an African accent. He also sounded very young. When I told her this, she was shocked. Clara believed that he really was Danish. “Phil” had sent her a picture of himself sitting in the sleeping quarters of a boat. The man in the shot was Asian and probably in his 40s, smiling with a thumbs up. A reverse Google Image search turned up nothing. Phil also sent her a picture of a hand holding a Vermont driver’s license with his name and picture on it, the same man from the boat picture, and a really bad photoshop ta boot.

Phil’s accent was very unique. It sounded like a mix of American East Coast New Yorker and African. It occurred to me that since Clara is not a native English speaker, she perhaps could not hear the strange nuances that I could. Then again, there was a lot about this story that she seemed to overlook. I asked her if, perhaps, she wanted “adventure” so much that she knowingly ignored all the warning signs. She seemed open to this. She said she had no interest in trying for romance in the real world. It was as if she was indeed looking for something that would fill her days, real or not.

It was time for me to do some research. There were a few options as to who was behind the scam, and all led to West Africa.

The most newsworthy of culprits were a group known as the Black Axe, an organized crime syndicate out of Nigeria. They have romance scams down to a science, even creating “best practices” to share among themselves. First, create a profile that makes being stuck in the middle of nowhere with no money or wifi a real possibility, such as international construction or even the military. Steal a picture from social media to use as your avatar. Find elderly women, determine their income after getting their address, and then hit them up for money based on that information. Clara had given her address to one of her “suitors,” who had sent her chocolates and flowers. Ostensibly this same person could search her apartment complex and find out that it is a subsidized housing residence. If she didn’t necessarily have cash on hand, she probably had good credit at her age.

The Black Axe is a scary bunch that allegedly launders money through their marks and has carried out rapes, mutilations, and murders. In October of this year, the DOJ busted a ring of them for allegedly scamming women on dating sites.

A news show in Australia ran a piece on less-organized but nonetheless skilled romance scammers in Ghana known as the “Yahoo Boys.” These are young men who make a living scamming elderly American women on dating sites.  They consider themselves business men and even refer to their marks as “clients.” They justify what they do by pointing to America’s history of colonization and slavery, as well as their own need to get out of poverty. What I found most interesting in the piece was the unique accents these boys had— a mixture of East Coast New Yorker and an African patois.

Once Clara gets her police report in hand, she will take it to her bank and attempt to get at least some of her money returned because she was defrauded. In the meantime, I connected her with agencies that help women like her, though at least one place told me that once a person gives someone their private, proprietary banking information, there’s not a lot anyone can do for them. Clara admitted that her friend Paul told her to just kiss the money goodbye. Her son told her to stop all contact with Phil.

Still, that adventurous spirit remains in her and she seems to be plotting ways to get back at Phil. Truly, the only thing she could do that would hurt him the most is stop giving him any money, though she could string him along I suppose and take up time that he could be using to hurt someone else. One thing that none of these guys seem to do is give up. And once you are dubbed what they call in African a “maga,” meaning gullible sap, they will “sell” you to the highest bidder who will try new ways to reel you in. By now, Clara’s name and address have probably been handed off to others. I took some solace in the fact that she lives in a very secure, well-run apartment complex.

I urged Clara to sign up for LifeLock or some other service that alerts you when someone tries to apply for things with your social security number. She waves her hand dismissively at the cost of $8 a month, though she is definitely on a fixed income. She can’t remember whether or not she gave Phil her SSN. After talking about it and hearing me stress that investing in some sort of credit security agency could save her a lot of money in the long run, she now became sure that she never gave him her social. Yes, she’s very sure, she says.

Clara showed me a package she recently got from USPS which contained nothing but a check for $20,000. It was from “In-Situ Inc.”, which appears to be a legitimate company, though the check is an obvious forgery. She has no idea who sent it. We traced it to Sacramento.

Clara promised me that she won’t try to cash it.

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