Falling in love… with a scammer — Spot the Red Flags Game to follow!
In the beautiful spring of 2021, a good friend told me how she started online dating to open a window in her life to more new connections. She shared how she has been using Hinge, a simple and fun app, and was pleasantly surprised by how many decent, interesting and attractive people are out there in the world. She encouraged me to try online dating as snowy Boston was warming up.
I have taken a long break from dating, choosing to work on my inner child, old toxic relationship patterns, and focus on my acupuncture graduate school. Everything was blossoming in New England, green shoots are sprouting everywhere, people are emerging slowly out of their lockdown cocoon as more and more people got vaccinated. So, I said to myself, “Why not?”
I reactivated my forgotten Hinge account and started swiping, reading profiles. The platform is simple, just upload a few pictures and choose a few quirky questions to answer.
I found Li’s profile to be interesting and attractive enough to swipe right and we began chatting.
Now, we can play the game of SPOT THE RED FLAGS!
On the profile, he has the unusual skill of massages and has a dream to travel the world. After some small talk, he invited me to chat on WhatsApp, away from Hinge.
The pictures were of a very attractive man processed with filters and quotes, reminding you of those unskilled scammers that send you random requests on Facebook, marketing themselves as divorced, kind, generous and single men.
I remained skeptical but open. He was so eloquent and interesting that I engaged in conversation.
Day two of messaging, he requested that we both delete Hinge so that we are not chatting with other people and just invest in our growing connection.
Impressed at how easily we conversed and connected, I was happy to take a break from more swiping, so I agreed. We chatted, shared life stories and here are his.
Li works in real estate and lives in Everett, a small town outside Boston. He uses a USA phone number but doesn’t use social media much. He has no Facebook. Being from China, he has a Wechat account with handful of pictures — pets but no humans.
He is a tech investor who sold his company which he cofounded with his childhood friend and came to the USA for a larger market. A family member helped him buy a house and he found a job with a large real estate development firm doing analytics work — Centex from Texas.
He does day-trading with Cryptocurrencies and his dream is to be financially independent by 40 so he can start his family, travel the world with his loved ones and live free.
He dated two people before at this young age of 32, the second ex cheated on him and ditched him for an older man with more money. So, he has vowed to be more financially stable, never losing love to the power of money. He was wounded and has stopped trusting love ever since.
Now, he says that he understands me and I understand him. All along the way, he repeatedly affirmed how we have a “soul-emotional-heart” connection. He thinks that physical beauty doesn’t matter as much in a long-term partnership. Cue many more manipulative talk about loving me as I am, caring about my troubles and struggles, wanting to be my support, my pillar and the one I can turn to.
Knowing that I am a volunteer and my aspirations to go into healing and philanthropy, he offered to teach me crypto trading so that we can have the financial resources to better the world and fulfill my dream. He would learn to take pictures and write so that he can chronicle our future adventures in the world, reintroducing ancestral and traditional healing modalities to the world, helping people live sustainably and responsibly.
As a woman blessed with many soul sisters, I love to gush. Out of respect, I asked for his permission to share what we have been discussing, especially his life stories. He said, before we meet in person, he prefers that everything we shared to remain between us, as our little secret. This is because the world doesn’t understand our ambition and how outrageously bold we are trying to chase our dreams with the new crypto industry. He repeatedly said that we have to selectively ignore advice and caution from our family and friends if we want to live an extraordinary life we choose.
Skeptical and mature Hui did not buy everything at face-value of course. I knew how love-bombing and manipulation works. I fact-checked him, I challenged him on his easy promises of love without knowing me or meeting me. I asked for a call. He replied with some pictures and voice messages. I called him out for being an AI bot. I said repeatedly that he sounds too good to be true, he looks too attractive and successful to be single.
He insisted on the story that he just hasn’t met the special one. He has strong integrity, values, will stay true to his life partner because he was cheated on before. He shared how he also volunteered in rural China, how his parents and grandparents taught him to be a good man. Blah blah blah. Mr. Perfect is just so perfect for Hui, and only Hui.
I said he probably stole someone’s profile and is not the person he claims to be. He sent a picture of a passport front page with the same picture. It looked legit with personal details, probably too legit and clear. Then, he deleted it out of data security issue.
Afterwards, when I still expressed my doubts that he is not real, he sent another picture of himself in bed, fully dressed in a goofy smile. He repeatedly said he is a real person and he just doesn’t want our first meeting to be over video call, he wanted to prepare a surprise for our in-person meeting, which should wait until 2 months later when he is vaccinated with at least the first dose.
Throughout our interaction, he was attentive and responsive for a good four to five hours a day, taking time to send me pictures of what he cooked sometimes, what he saw at the grocery stores and so on.
He had a whole life story of growing up in rural China, being beaten up for being the naughty kid who stole crops, chased animals, lost cows in the beautiful nature. He had stories from middle school, childhood pictures of himself and his cousins, everyone had their stories, and stories of him navigating Chongqing, the mysterious mountain city where he went to college.
At day 5 or 6, he offered to teach me how to trade Cryptocurrency. I already knew about coinbase and had started learning to invest in Crypto. He showed me a trading platform ANX where people do very risky options (put/calls) trades by the minute every day.
This is the link to the scamming Coin Trading Platform, please tell everyone.
It was a sophisticated site with super responsive customer service helping users move their money from crypto-wallet to crypto-wallet in multiple languages. He took screenshots and guided me step by step to move money onto the site. All the while, he insisted that we will donate all our proceeds to charity and I should not worry about tax consequences if I am investing with my IRA retirement accounts because it is all for a good cause.
They have 24/7 customer service designed to trick you into depositing money and do day trading with crypto currency. There is no possible way to get your money out.
How many red flags did you spot?
Like all Hui’s friends, you probably spotted many! What would you do at that point as a friend? Your friend is falling in love with a scammer! She should know that this is too good to be true! But she is radiant and glowing with hope that this Mr. Perfect will bring her happiness, help her fulfill her dreams and much more. What can a friend do to help a friend blinded by love/infatuation or love-bombed by a scammer?
Lucky for Hui, all her friends cautioned her to never divulge any financial information, and never ever send this person any money before meeting in person and knowing them on a real-basis.
Most of all, my younger sister asked for his picture that he sent me (lost access to his other pictures after I deleted Hinge) and did a google search to investigate.
Guess what?
The only picture I saved of him was one of the many Instagram pictures from a cute guy in Taiwan who was so tired of people messaging him that he had to declare that he is the real Roy. Scammers have been using his pictures to chat up women around the world. And crypto currency trading, forex trading, international travel has always been the theme of the scam because Roy is a traveler, he posts a lot of pictures on Instagram of his travel life.
It has been exactly one week since we first exchanged messages on Hinge today as I am writing this.
I woke up to my sister’s message that Li is a scammer, she was gentle enough to tell me that her investigation was out of an intention to protect me. It was a wake up call. I sent the screenshots of the Facebook post from Roy, asking for an answer.
Li said, what happened? I am not that person. Then he asked, do you remember how you felt whenever we connected? Do you trust your heart? Do you trust me? (which was a phrase he used so often to gaslight me) I asked, who are you, where are you? Just answer a video call and everything can be cleared up. Just a short drive and you can appear in front of me in person to prove that you’re not a fiction. He said he has to go to work and he will deal with this later. And offered to write our names on a paper declaring his love for me. Nothing about meeting in person or showing his face. After he ignored my first and final attempted video call on WhatsApp, I was fully awake to the reality and told him that I will report and block his account.
Did I expect this? Yes, in a way, the skeptic in me is shouting gleefully “Told you so, Hui!”
However, I am deeply shaken, disappointed and mostly in shock. How did I allow myself to disregard all the blazing red flags? Did I have an emotional addiction that I was not aware of? How did I let myself “fall” so easily in a week? Can I trust the world? Can I trust anything that anyone says these days? Are full honesty and vulnerability still a safe way to show up?
I was grateful that I opened my heart and took a chance to connect with another soul. I am tremendously grateful that my heart is alive and I can “fall” and feel strong feelings for another human and yearn to be in that intimate capacity, even without a physical in-person meeting. I am also deeply awakened to the fact that emotions are fragile and so easily manipulated. Words are powerful, and texting is a big way that all of us connect and communicate with strangers every day, on the internet.
I am heartbroken that such a beautiful softness of the human heart, human emotions are being exploited every day, by countless scammers who know exactly what to say, what do offer to make you willingly ignore all the FLASHING WARNING LIGHTS in your heart. Many women and men… have suffered worse letdowns than mine.
Sharing this story is deeply healing for my shocked heart. To end, here are some tools that I would love to equip anyone who is open to connecting with strangers online in any channel — dating sites, social media, etc…
- Start in person or move to an in-person meeting as soon as you can. Ask for a video call if meeting in-person is not possible. Interacting face-to-face is key to any relationship and unless you plan to be long-distanced forever, why not test out how you feel around each other in person.
- When your intuition doubts the validity of someone’s pictures, trust your gut. Google search by image and check if they are public domain — pictures of celebrities, Instagram profiles and so on!
- When someone says they love you before even meeting you in person or knowing you for at least a few in-person interactions, challenge that! Can you love a stranger without any shared life experience? That is love-bombing and manipulative language.
- Words are empty and meaningless, no matter how they make you feel. Let a person prove their words through actual action.
- Cryptocurrency or forex or any online trading is still touching your finances. NEVER give a stranger your log in details or ability to control your money. Finances are very personal and if they want to manage your money this early on in a relationship, BIG RED FLAG! Conversations about money and values around money are totally cool but be cautious why they are curious and whether they are offering real proof to back up their statements.
- Online scam is a huge industry around the world. Scammers are becoming more and more sophisticated in their stories, technology and psychology. There are also people who dated in person for years before being scammed by the partner. Many people have fallen prey to liars online. You are not alone, and you are not less than because you were victimized.
Finally, your heart is strong and it is ready to endure the truth, the separation, breaking the gaslight and extracting itself from a lie that will never become reality. What is too good to be true may not be true this time, but you will be okay. Another day will come, and the butterflies that came, the motivation and new energy that comes from falling in love will come again. You don’t have to lose faith in the world. There are good people out there and you are loved by many, many in your life who wouldn’t never want to see you getting hurt.
I guess I will see some of you on Hinge maybe :)! Have fun swiping and social media-ing but please stay SAFE everyone!
