Multiple Faces Detected
April 4th, 2023
Sherly is a woman from Texas who was romantically scammed out of more than $50k. It all started when she was approached by a man named Micheal on Linkedin. His opening line was harmless, and it allowed him to get the conversation flowing.
By inquiring about how she was coping during the pandemic, he inadvertently fulfilled Sherly’s need for someone to check up on her. It wasn’t specifically the pandemic that she needed to discuss, but rather the fact that she required someone to ask her how she was doing.
Her husband had recently died, and she was having a very difficult time coping with the loss, so once Micheal reached out to her, she felt that she finally had someone to talk to.
Micheal was an oil rig worker working just off the coast of Mexico. He also had a son that was living in Denver with a family member. After talking for a while, Micheal told Sherly that his son’s Xbox broke and he didn’t have access to his funds to buy a new one. Once she heard this, Sherly volunteered to buy him a new one.
Still grateful for the emotional support that Micheal gave her, she was happy to get his son an Xbox. She spent over $1,800 on a brand new console and the most expensive headset available. But once she shipped the package to where Micheal had instructed her, the post office called her and said they refused to send her package, because it was going someplace unaccepted, Africa.
Once Sherly heard this, she was shocked. She had to think about whether or not Micheal really was who he claimed to be. After all, they had been talking for a while and they still hadn’t video chatted or been on a phone call.
Once she confronted Micheal, he was able to make enough excuses to get her to believe him. But that was far from the last time that Micheal would ever need a favor.
Not to long after, Micheal started needing money to buy food for himself and his crew, and not too long after that, he would claim to need money for a broken piece of equipment on the oil rig that would cost $50,000. Some of these requests Sherly would satisfy, and some of these she would make excuses for why she couldn’t help, she ended up losing thousands of dollars. But she felt like maybe it was all going to be worth it, when the day came that Micheal would finally step off a plane and see her.
It seemed like that day had come. Micheal claimed to be boarding a plane headed to Texas to finally continue their relationship in person. He even sent Sherly a picture of himself at the airport, but the planes had strange logos on them that Sherly had never seen before.
She started getting even more suspicious when she was making small talk with her limo driver who was taking her to the airport. He asked her what Micheal’s flight number was, and she replied that he didn’t give her one. The driver seemed uneasy. He asked her if she had ever actually met the man before, implying that the story didn’t add up from the outside looking in. Feeling a little bit ashamed, Sherly insisted “Yes, he is my fiance!”. She did not feel confident in this statement.
When she got to the airport, she sat at the terminal and watched everyone get off the plane. She sat and watched for a long time. She sat at the airport for hours, and Michael was nowhere to be found. Once again, she confronted Micheal, and he had a perfectly good excuse. He had been detained by the Mexican government and he would need her to send more money to get him out.
At this point, Sherly was ashamed and confused. She turned to Social Catfish to help her find closure.
While doing some light searching on SocialCatfish.com, we were able to find that “Michael” was not who he said he was at all. He was a romance scammer who had stolen his images from “DJ Feel” a famous European dj. Even with knowing this information, Sherly was unable to walk away. Micheal had already got her hooked on the exploitative relationship.
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