A WOMAN has been scammed out of half a million dollars by a romantic swindler she met online — and now she is warning others to watch out for the telltale signs..READ FULL ARTICLE HERE>>>>
Shelley Smith, a 60-year-old Canadian woman, asked reporters to use a pseudonym to protect her identity after suffering from a fallout with her family and friends over the money she lost.
She fell victim to a bold ‘catfishing’ scam— when a victim is lured into a romantic trap by a misleading person who is typically lying about their identity and intentions.
But Smith said she wants people to know that fraud can happen to anyone, so she shared her heartbreaking story with the Canadian Broadcasting Channelin 2023.
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“It’s easy to look at people and go, ‘How stupid could she be?’ But it’s not that. It’s that people are in a place in their life where they’re so vulnerable that they fall victim to something like this,” Smith said.
Smith met the man who would rob of her everything she was worth in September 2021, shortly after both her only brother and her father had passed away.
Her mother had also recently been diagnosed with dementia and she was suffering from her own issues, Smith said.
“I was probably the most vulnerable that I’ve ever been in my entire life,” she said.
So when she connected with 62-year-old Carl Pettersson from Calgary on the popular dating app Zoosk and he began to show her the attention and kindness she was looking for, she quickly developed feelings.
But the man, whose real name is unknown, was using a fake identity and photos on the dating profile.
She thought it was odd that he always came up with an excuse to avoid meeting in person, she said, but the pair kept in constant contact and she had understood that he was often busy traveling for his business.
The scam really kicked off when Pettersson told Smith he needed her help wiring money from one of his accounts to a contractor after he had damaged his computer.
She was happy to do the favor and surprised to find that the man had over $1 million in his account — a sleek trick to make her think he was wealthy.
“They groom yo… it had his name and everything. It’s quite elaborate what they can do,” Smith said.
Thenthe thief began complaining of various problems that he couldn’t fix because of other problems or surprise illnesses until Smith herself offered to provide financial support.
“It was just going to be the short term, and that just progressed — from that to ‘I just need another blah blah blah to get home and I’ll make all of this right,’ and then one problem after another,” she said.
At first, Pettersson refused Smith’s help.
But a week later, he began accepting what would end up totaling about half a million dollars in cash payments and equipment transfers from Smith.
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He told her not to tell her family or friends or they might judge him when they finally meet.
And when she questioned his decisions, he often flipped the situation on her.
“‘How dare you say that after all we’ve been through. I can’t believe you would say that.’ So then there’s guilt placed on you that you’re doubting [him],” recounted Smith.
The ruse continued for months, as Smith ignored the red flags and Pettersson continued to create new “problems” that ultimately led her to borrow money from her friends and family, take out a second mortgage on her home, and open up another line of home equity.
Reality only hit when her cousins did a reverse image search online and realized that the photo of the man she believed to be Pettersson was used on several dating profiles and was actually stolen from a man in Denver.
“Finding out that you know this wasn’t real and then that clearly I’d lost all of this money, I crashed,” Smith said.
The discovery dragged her into depression, she said.
“I was feeling suicidal. I was so devastated.”
CBC tracked down the real man behind the photo, Bradley Joseph.
He said that he has been getting emails from women all over the world who have been duped by someone using his photo for at least the last five years.
“It makes me uncomfortable and it makes me really sad and I get angry, there’s so many people out there who are just lonely and vulnerable,” Joseph said.
Although Smith said she has accepted full responsibility for the mistakes she has made, she said that she thinks
online dating platforms like Zoosk should do more to protect users from scammers and fake accounts.
“My biggest thing right now is I can’t walk away from this without trying to make a difference somehow,” said Smith.
She said that she wants platforms to do better background checks, possibly by requiring two forms of identity before signing up, and to spread more awareness about the red flags people should be watching out for.
But courts ruled that online dating platforms are not responsible for users who use their sites to defraud other users in a 2023 ruling for a case with Match.com, making it more difficult that Smith’s push for better protection will be heeded.
More and more people have fallen victim to clever fraud scams involving online dating profiles, banks, ATMS, and other means in recent years.
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The Federal Trade Commission estimated that at least $8.8 billion was stolen through scams in 2022 alone, up by 30% from the previous year.
An artist was conned out of over $3,000 by scammers who tricked her into transferring money out of her Bank of America account earlier this month.
And a church pastor lost over $6,000 when he was taken by a gift card scheme earlier this year — and Chase Bank reportedly will not return the money, he said.
Representatives for thedating app Zoosk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The U.S. Sun..READ FULL ARTICLE HERE>>>>
