The Scam

Well it seemed that being on a christian internet website wasn’t going to work for me, and I still had a few months left on my 6 month pledge to my friend.  I wished I had told her I would give it a month, but I am a woman of my word, plus there was always that nagging “what if….”.  So I continue onto a website where I had to pay to be a member.  Almost immediately I got an email from a man who said he was interested in knowing more about me.  We set off to chatting on the website, and I soon found out that he was a single widowed dad from Chicago.  He said he was a gemologist, and went into great length telling me about the business and how it works.  He said he traveled extensively throughout the world, and was an independent contractor, so to speak.  I noticed that each time we e-mailed each other his typing style appeared to be different.  I also noticed that his “speech” while typing seemed to be different from perhaps a person who speaks fluent English.  When I questioned him, he told me that he was born in Spain, came to America 10 years ago and was now living with his son and his elderly aunt.    JACKPOT…..a Spaniard!  I immediately googled spanish movie stars and came up with Antonio Bandaras.  HaTaTaTa….at that point I didn’t care if he spoke Martian.

We continued to email back and forth for several more weeks.  I just couldn’t shake that gut feeling that something just wasn’t right, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  He was evasive answering personal questions and again the typing seemed to be done by different people.  Was I just being paranoid?  Then the emails stopped for several days…..when I sent him one asking if he was ok, he stated he was in England on a job and needed to hire a lawyer to look over the contracts.  The problem was that he needed to pay the lawyer before he would look over the documents, and he was short $1250.00.  “Would you be and angel and wire me some money? Any amount would help”……He sent me a phone number that I could call him on (which I googled and it was a British area code) when I was ready to wire the money.  Now I am not sure what planet he was from, but this sister wasn’t going to send one Euro to him.  I was so angry with myself by not listening to my gut and telling him to take a hike earlier.  I sent him a final email telling him that I had read up on internet scams and he would need to look elsewhere.  He actually sent me another email telling me that he understood, and he would take $250.00 instead.  Maybe meeting men in a bar isn’t such a bad idea after all?

Advertisements