A friend of mine is being scammed from someone she met on a dating website. It has all the telltale signs of a fraud scam and she has fallen for him. I learned about it because she invited me to their wedding and then she called me to find out advise on how to send him $200k. She already spent $2500 setting up a bank account that she gave him access to. She doesn’t know or accept that it is a fraud, and I haven’t told her I am convinced it is. I can give more details about him and why I know it is a fraud. It is an amazing story of fiction very creative where he works for a company as a surgeon and is on a project in Egypt on assignment.
I want to do something and am looking for advise.
Hi there,
yup, you're right: that clearly looks like a scam, especially this huge amount of money, $200k.
Here are some resources online about romance scams from official sources she might trust. I never personally had this experience but I could imagine you watch/read these materials and if you have enough knowledge about her scammer's story, you could point out the 1:1 similarities to the cases/information these official sources are pointing out, e.g. the person is avoiding a real live video call or is constantly delaying and postponing it.
Then, I'd "confront" her about it. Make sure it's not a confrontation but a friendly talk. If it's getting heated try to calm yourself and herself down because usually victims will shut down and not listen to anything if they get verbally attacked. Then they'll blame outsiders for being jealous of her romantic relationship etc. So try to be understanding and show her the evidence and the material.
I once faced an instance while in high school when some gay romance scammer tried to get in touch with me. But I wasn’t interested in a relationship so shut him out forever. He tried the same on my classmate who ironically was also my benchmate but we discussed about this guy messaging us and chose to ignore it. To this day, I have not been in a relationship with anyone.
I thought about another method which I found in Dr Phil’s show online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWLDzumfhwY
Basically, Dr Phil found out the real person whose pictures have been misused by the scammers to impersonate that guy and he asked him to come in a video call to show the victim that this is the real person and he doesn't know her at all and that all the stories about being a soldier, missing a flight etc are fake.
It's possible to reverse search the images the scammer is using:
- https://yandex.com/images/
- https://www.google.com/imghp
on both sites, click on the camera icon to upload a picture. Using that search, you might be able to find the real person or other scammed victims who have shared the picture online. Maybe that'll open her eyes.
@NeeP#172401 I’ve done reverse search of twitter profile pics, and found they used someone’s photo somewhere. Once i even posted on one faker’s female account that he/she is impersonating someone but I was amazed by the speed with which he proceeded to remove the tweet (few minutes, likely someone saw it). Next I proceeded to report it to twitter with the link to the original person and in 24 hours the account was banned. The girl whose pic he used had very similar looks to one of my classmates so the very next day during the break, I showed her the picture and told her it seemed to look like her. At first she was stoned but later calmed down after she realised it wasn’t her.
@Andromeda#172404 Since this incident I proceeded to report multiple accounts this way and got them all banned