When Movies Sound Like Real Life

 February 11, 2022

There's a movie that is trending right now called The Tinder Swindler, about a man who used the Tinder app to con women.  Women who fell for him and his lavish lifestyle didn't realize that they were, in fact, funding that opulent and extravagent lifestyle.  It's hard to believe that women could be fooled into sending money to a man they really don't know, but it's also difficult to believe that there are people who make a living preying on people's faith and trust in this way.  And yet, I have actually come across at least one of those men in my own experiences with dating apps, a year or two ago. 

A man reached out to me and relatively quickly wanted to switch to texting instead of using the app.  Weirdly, we also switched to email as well, which in retrospect makes me think that perhaps it was easier for him to check spelling and grammar in that format, rather than through the phone.  We chatted, and according to him, he was from my city, but had temporarily relocated to South America for a big architectural project that he had won the bid for.  Supposedly the project was going to make him very wealthy, but he didn't want to be that far away from his mother or son for the amount of time the project would take, so he relocated them with him temporarily.  He seemed articulate, genuine, and interested in learning more about me.

The first few exchanges were fun; getting to know someone new can be exciting. However, I am a relatively reserved person until you get to know me, and his 'affection' for me seemed to grow at a speed with which I was uncomfortable.  Within a few days he was saying I seemed to be a person he could spend the rest of his life with--his soulmate. He also said he had shown my dating profile picture to his son who, according to him, said I looked like the kind of person who could become his new mother.  

Okay--so that was weird.  I told him we didn't know each other yet, but he continued to insist that we seemed a perfect match.  He wanted to send me a token of his 'affection' for me, but I told him I didn't give my address to anyone I hadn't met in person so that would not be happening.  He said he understood.

On the sixth day (SIXTH DAY!), he texted me and told me he was having a tough morning because his mother had been rushed to the hospital.  I told him I was sorry to hear it, and that I hoped she recovered quickly.  That evening, he texted and said that his mother was awaiting treatment, but they wouldn't give her proper treatment unless he paid $9,000 up front.  Sadly, his partner in his architectural firm had run back off to the United States with most of their business funds (which he would recover when he got paid for the completed bridge project he was working on), but for the time being he only had $4,000 in his bank account.  He texted, "Hon, would you please send me the other $5,000 so that I can get my mother's treatment started? Of course I will pay you back double when I finish the bridge."  Staring at the phone, I laughed out loud.  Do people actually fall for this kind of thing? Does this actually work?  I texted back and simply said I didn't have the money.

The next day he texted again, pleading with me to send him $5,000.  I told him I had never met him, and I had only just started texting him less than a week ago; there was no way I was goinig to send him that kind of money.  He said he couldn't believe that I hadn't turned out to be the kind and loving woman he thought he had been talking to.  I quit responding.  He tried one more time, to no avail.

I reported him to the dating app I had met him on, and then I did a reverse image search on his profile picture.  That led me to a Facebook group that was basically a clearinghouse of reports of dating app scammers--a kind of word-to-the-wise message board.  'His' picture was juxaposed to someone else's photo--the real man behind the texts and emails, based out of Africa.  He had scammed women out of thousands of dollars--some as much as $50,000.  Some of them cleaned out their retirement or their life savings for him.  I read incredulously of all of the accounts of women who had lost their hearts and their money to these scammers.  It was pretty heart-breaking, really.  These women so desperately wanted to believe in love and in the hope for a future with someone too good to be true, that they were willing to set aside their sense of scrutiny and skepticism and found themselves taken advantage of.  

Now I am an optimist, and a romantic.  I truly am.  But I think this man got sloppy, got greedy.  I'm not sure what else accounts for the fact that he decided to ask me for money within a week, but in most of the accounts I'd read about, the many took many more weeks or months to develop a relationship before the women were asked to send money for various reasons.  Thankfully, I didn't get invested in this false persona he was developing so that I only saw it as a pretty ridiculous circumstance that I found myself in, rather than a devastating, heartbreaking loss of love, with awful finiancial side effects.