The Guy I Was Talking To Online Was A Romance Scammer. Here’s What Tipped Me Off — And How I Turned The Tables On Him.
When Facebook Dating served me up both an international pilot and a mega-bucks currency trader in the same week in 2021, I should have known they were too good to be true.
But I was a tad naive, as I’d spent the last seven years meeting someone/having children/splitting up and then neck deep in single parenting. But now I was ready to get back to having a dating life. My previous experience of online dating in 2012-13 was pre-dating apps. I’d met more than a handful of decent guys, some of whom I had relationships with, some who became friends.
Back then, talking online was genuinely just a step in the process of actually meeting in real life. In this new swiping era, it seemed that hanging out on the app having pointless conversations was the end goal. It was so boring. I wanted to go on actual dates on my rare days off from motherhood. But, although app dating hadn’t been very successful, I hadn’t encountered anyone who was obviously misrepresenting themselves before.
The Turkish pilot supposedly based near the Spanish city where I live never wanted to meet in person, so that trailed off pretty quickly. But the trader was chattier, and the conversation soon moved off Facebook and onto WhatsApp, which I’d found to be a pretty standard progression in the endless chatting game.
I didn’t suspect the fakery when he claimed a fiancée and unborn child were killed in a car crash, though it did make me feel a bit awkward. It seemed like a lot to reveal in the first couple of days of messaging, and I didn’t really know what I was supposed to say. I didn’t even catch on when he sent screenshots of his five-figure trades and asked me if I was “making much money as a writer.”
Instead I was intrigued. I told him how I’d messed around exchanging currencies for profit when I lived in Istanbul, Turkey, around 2006–2008, before the financial crisis.I began to wonder what it must be like to learn how to trade currency for real. He promised to teach me and told me that I’d learn best through practical trading experience. He even sent a link to a trading platform for me to register and open an account so I could learn through practicing.
I now know 70,000 Americans fell for these cons in 2022, collectively handing over $1.3 billion. These scams usually involve sending victims a link of some kind (which you should never click on). If it’s related to trading or some other way of making money, they’ll probably get you to put in a small sum at first to gain your confidence. It might seem like your “investments” or “trades” are successful, and you might even withdraw some of your profits. It’s at this point that they know they’ve got you on the hook. Then they just have to reel you into depositing larger and larger sums until, suddenly, they disappear, along with the money in the dupe account.
But at the time I was clueless to the fact that this was a classic romance scam. I was seriously naive despite my master’s degree and my background in teaching and writing educational materials. Incredible as it may seem, I can understand how people get sucked into these scammers’ lies because I didn’t suspect for a while, maybe because he’d popped up at a time in my life when I was looking for a change. He was correct that writing didn’t pay much. And I was dying inside writing content for educational publishers that required little creativity.
When he suggested trading, it wasn’t so much the prospect that I too could earn $32,000 a day that appealed to me. What he was dangling was the idea that there was something more exciting I could be doing while stuck in front of a laptop all day.
But, although my qualifications and experience weren’t helping me spot the scam, they were partly what saved me from it.
As an educator and writer who’d worked on numerous online courses, I knew that just being an expert at something doesn’t make you a good teacher. My professional background makes me highly critical of bad teaching, and I want anything I study to be pedagogically sound. So, even though I still believed he was making tens of thousands of dollars a day, there was no way I would have let him teach me.
That, together with my genuine curiosity about investing, meant that I immediately started googling online trading courses. I whittled them down to those that looked likely to be well-designed and told him he’d inspired me to learn about trading myself.
This, of course, was not welcome news to my would-be scammer. He tried to convince me that I would only get so far with theory and the only way to succeed was to learn by doing. As an education writer, I knew that was nonsense. A well-thought-out course will introduce a practical element only when you’ve got the basic ideas covered. Even a scuba diving certificate starts off in the classroom.
By then I was burning through the entry-level modules on my online trading course. As my scammer got pushier and more insistent, I finally realized a normal person would have let it go. And why would anyone want to spend their time teaching someone they’d never met anyway?
When I told him it was clear that he was a scammer, he got nasty. He said I was a failed writer who would never succeed, that I was cruel and cocky, and that I should be grateful to him for trying to help me grow and change. I eventually let him have the last word, stopped replying and archived the chat.
In fact, in many ways I am grateful to him. Even though the online course got too hard for me, I carried on looking into investing. That’s how I came to learn about passive investing through index funds. I started taking financial steps for the first time — like opening a pension fund and putting my savings into investments.
From there, my background in education and writing came in handy again. I created my own courses teaching investing to fellow teachers and writers. They, like me before, typically know little about personal finance and investing, and could also be at risk of falling for a scam.
Once my business is well-established, I still might take a trading course one day because, even though that guy was a fake, trading is a genuine occupation. It requires months of hard work and discipline, but I have a feeling I’d like it.
As for online dating, I dabbled for another six months before quitting for over two years. I used the time I’d wasted swiping and chatting to build my business. Now that I’m tentatively back on one of the apps, I ignore messages from too-good-looking-to-be-true profiles with glamorous or heroic jobs like pilot, trader, medic in a disaster area, firefighter or oil rig worker.
In fact, I follow the Burned Haystack Dating method, so I’m ruthless about blocking anyone who shows any red flags. So far, I haven’t had any conversations that seem like scams. Things like revealing personal tragedy in the first few messages or using insistent or defensive language are an immediate “Block to Burn” as the method’s founder, Jennie Young, calls it. I never agree to move the chat off the app, as that’s a classic scammer move to get your phone number, and I have a screening question about when they’d like to meet. That means less wasted time trading messages and it’s less appealing to scammers because they only ever want to message.
In 2021, bored and swiping on dating apps, I’d been looking for a change. I didn’t expect to find it through work, not romance, but none of it would have come about without that scammer.
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