My Encounter with a Scam
In my quest for love, I fell victim to a dating scam that cost me emotionally and financially. This experience taught me valuable lessons about an online dating and crypto scam.
My Phone Says It Wants To Meet You
2025 was a year that was supposed to be a very happy and joy filled year for me. I would be celebrating my 67th birthday in September and would be retiring in the middle of June. I was proud of this accomplishment, considering I had been in the workforce for 50 years, may-be a year or two more. I had had a heart attack and quadruple by-pass surgery in the first week of 2019 but felt that I had taken reasonable steps to improve my health. I had quit smoking and adopted a healthier diet and was feeling like my health wasn’t an issue.
The first blow came in early April. It was a Monday and I had to work. Mondays were one of my wife’s off workdays. When I arrived home after working a tiring 8-hour shift, I was shocked (to say the least) to find that my wife had moved all of her things out of the master bedroom and into one of the smaller, spare bedrooms. She said that she just wanted her own space. I thought this was kind of odd, to do it on a day that I had to work, without even saying anything about it to me. We just kind of walked around it for a couple of days, like it was this giant elephant in the room.
When we did talk about it a couple of days later, she said that after 34 years of marriage, she just didn’t want to be married anymore. Okay, so that was a very big blow. One that I’m not sure if I am totally over yet, some 10 months later. She had all of her belongings moved out of the house within two weeks. So, here I was. Almost 67 and almost retired and now, almost divorced. My life had been stood on end. The divorce would be final by the end of July. It was very amicable, thank God. We had nothing to fight over. The mortgage was in my name, and she let me keep the house.
So here I was, wandering around in a 4-bedroom, 2 1/2 bath house that was pretty much void of furniture. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. I didn’t have many friends, but I knew that I didn’t want to be lonely, or alone for that matter, for the rest of my life. So, I decided to join an online dating site, one that I had used almost 20 years earlier, when me and my ex went through our first separation. I won’t call it out by name but just know that what I am about to share could have happened on ANY online dating site.
Before the end of April, I had met a very nice woman on the dating site and we began a long distance, on-line relationship. We lived about 500 miles apart and there was a huge gap in our ages, but at that time, it didn’t seem to matter. It seemed like we had hit it off very well. We would text each other for a few hours every night, sometimes longer on weekends. We shared our likes and dislikes, what had happened to each other during the day. Our hopes, desires, plans for our lives. The kind of things that people do when trying to get to know each other.
Over the course of the next several weeks, I had really started to fall in love with this beautiful younger woman. Jodi (not her real name) had convinced me to sign up for a peer-to-peer money transfer app so I could help her buy a new cell phone. It seems that hers had been dropped and the mouthpiece was broke and rendered useless. This seemed like a reasonable request considering that her stipulation on us ever meeting was that we had to converse by phone as well as texting. I purposefully never mentioned it with her for several weeks. I just sent her some money through the app to help her out.
It could have been because one thing Jodi said to ease my concerns was that “with big risks come big rewards.” I was very intrigued as to what kind of rewards awaited if I helped her. Then, the next emergency came along. Her mother, who was living in Sweden had lost contact with her. After about a week, Jodi was able to find out that her mother became seriously ill. She had to get to Sweden somehow to see her mom whom she hadn’t seen in over 4 years. That in and of itself didn’t seem too far-fetched. Jodi was able (supposedly) to get help from her local church and her employer to pay for the air fare to Sweden.
But she still need help with other expenses. I decided it was time to ask her about the money that I had sent to help her get a new phone. Jodi said that when it arrived, it was damaged and she hadn’t sent it back for a replacement yet. Now, being that I’m in my late 60’s and she’s in her early 30’s, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. The younger generation doesn’t seem to have the sense of urgency about things like my generation does. I sent her another small sum of money to help out, but with a couple of requests that she agreed to follow through with, but never did.
The day of her flight came, and she texted me when she was at the airport, ready to board her flight. Almost a week went by before I heard anything from her. Then I got an email saying things like she was okay, wasn’t sure about her cell phone coverage and updated the situation with her mom. It took almost another week before she was able to get her mom into a hospital to find out what was wrong with her. She was diagnosed with appendicitis, but they wouldn’t operate because her mom had failed to renew her state provided medical insurance.
It just seemed strange that any medical facility or doctor would let a person suffer from appendicitis and keep her in the hospital for over a week treating the pain. But hey, this is a foreign country, and I don’t know their policies or laws. I was still very much in love with Jodi and once again gave her the benefit of the doubt.
I hadn’t taken my profile off of the dating site or canceled my subscription. In fact, I checked it every few days just to see who was checking me out. This was when the second big blow hit. The one that would change my life forever. While checking on my profile in early July, I had a message from another very attractive looking younger woman. It read, “My Phone Says It Wants To Meet You.” Since I was already beginning to doubt Jodi’s credibility, I responded to this message. One of the first things this woman (I’ll call her Lynn) asked was whether I used or had heard of a certain chatting app.
I hadn’t and at that time I didn’t see anything wrong with using the app that she recommended rather than the normal one on my smart phone. I was also able to download the same app on my computer, which was an option that I liked better. Because of my age, I guess, I’m not very tech savvy with phones. I prefer a desktop with keyboard and mouse. They are much more user friendly to me. After a couple of days of texting with Lynn, she asked if we could do a video chat. She wanted to see that I was a “real person”. I thought that this sounded like a good idea, especially since I couldn’t even have a phone conversation with Jodi.
In retrospect, I think it may have even made me feel more comfortable with starting a relationship with her. Over the next week, we texted constantly, several time a day. I had broken off the relationship with Jodi as I was feeling like she was just trying to get money from me.
Lynn shared her life with me, and I shared my life with her. I found out that she was a divorced mother of a 6-year-old boy. She owned her own company and was financially independent. The huge gap in our ages didn’t matter to her. She was planning to be retired within the next 2-5 years and was looking for someone to travel the world with her and her son. Since I had already raised a family of my own, she felt that I would be a good father figure for her son.
It was probably in the second week of meeting her, Lynn started asking about my finances. She knew everything else about me, the divorce and that I was retired. I was a little hesitant at first, but she had made me feel so at ease and like we were meant to be. So, I shared with her that I had a 5-figure 401K retirement account that I was looking for somewhere to move the funds too. That’s when she started talking about crypto, wanting to know how much I knew about it and if I had any money into cryptocurrencies.
The next day I sent her a text, with several quotes from different websites about online dating scams and crypto scams. That’s when I got her “life story”. She had caught her ex-husband in bed with her best friend during her pregnancy. Then he stole all of the money she had that was going to be used to start her own business. She supposedly had a degree in Financial Management from the University of Singapore and had moved to the US soon after her divorce. She worked multiple jobs for a few years and lived in a back room of one of them until she had scrapped up enough to open her business.
She had also been scammed out of a large sum of money, but because she was “independently wealthy” it hadn’t hurt her very much. Her story seemed plausible, so I believed her. We had been sharing photos since meeting and her house was incredible. She had paid almost $1.75 million for a two-story home with a large balcony and a pool. She had even shared photos of her son Hank.
Over the course of this relationship, we shared all kinds of photos with each other, nothing sexually explicit, but I shared photos of my home, both inside and out. We shared photos of what we were doing. Me working in the garden, her playing golf or visiting with friends or having dinner at restaurants. I didn’t see anything wrong with any of this. After all, we were “soul mates” and had even gone as far as to make plans on getting married. I think she had fully gained my trust by the end of July.
It was around that time, or in early August that she really started pushing this cryptocurrency savings plan that would generate a large amount of passive income. Her sister had supposedly graduated from Cambridge University in the UK and was a special advisor in the crypto field at the European Central Bank. She also participated in the development of the Ethereum blockchain source code. There was a new blockchain project coming up that her sister was a key player in and Lynn wanted me to be able to get involved in it before the opportunity was no longer available.
I didn’t have any funds available at the time, but within a month I would close out a middle 5 figure 401K and transfer it into a cryptocurrency platform. Lynn had become my teacher, and I was a good student often drawing her praises and affirmations. By doing screenshots of every step and sending them to her, she was able to help me get everything set up. Meanwhile, her sister was able to keep a quota spot open for me. There was a search bar on the crypto platform that she had me set and she had me type in an address, supposedly for the company or entity that would be managing this savings account.
This savings plan was set up where there were different monetary tiers with interest rates. The higher the monetary level, the higher the earning rates. After my initial deposits by the end of August, I was seeing daily interest rate of returns as high as $6,500 hundred every day. Everything went along great for the few weeks. Lynn and I were still professing our undying love for each other, still sharing a lot of photos, and still making plans for a future life together.
Then this “savings plan” offered the opportunity for buying or owning smart contracts which would pay higher daily interest, they called it dividends, with any opportunity to receive air drop rewards of Ethereum. This was a way to earn more for being involved with this plan. This plan had different dollar amounts for the contracts with each tier offing more rewards and dividends. I made the mistake of choosing one of the higher amounts and was left scrambling to come up with enough cash to meet the contract.
At Lynn’s insistence, I did a cash out refinance on my home mortgage. My original mortgage was almost half paid off, but that didn’t matter because if I didn’t raise enough capital, I would lose everything that I had already put into this venture. However, it was still nowhere close to what I needed to meet the contract obligation so that I could withdraw all of my funds.
Our relationship continued to flourish. We continued to share photos. Lynn even set me photos of her hotel when she had to go to New York on a business trip. We were still making plans to meet, still making plans to share our lives together. However, I still needed funds to meet my contract so I would be eligible for the added rewards. The next step was to close out a very large Annuity account which was originally set up from an inheritance from my mom’s estate.
After sending the next, and largest amount I had sent by wire transfer, the beneficiary claimed that they never received the wire transfer. It took several weeks of going back and forth with my bank and the company that was managing the crypto savings plan, and some help from Lynn’s sister to finally find these lost wire transfer funds and get them deposited into the crypto account.
By the end of November 2025, and with the earned interest added to my crypto funds, I had finally reached that magical dollar amount to fulfill my smart contract. Now I could withdraw all of my original funds invested plus the interest. I was so relieved. It was an impressive mid 6 figure dollar amount. Now I could pay off my new mortgage, which, by the way, had doubled from the original mortgage that I had before all of this started. I would now be able to have the kind of retirement that I had always dreamed about.
Then the next major blow came. When I tried to withdraw my funds, I was informed that I would have to pay another high 5 figure amount to prove that I could pay the California taxes. “Not to worry” they said. “It’s just to show that you are able to pay the taxes. This amount will also be able to be withdrawn along with all of you funds after we receive it.” I was devastated. I had nothing more to deposit into the account and didn’t have any idea what I was going to do.
Lynn added a large sum of her money to try and help, but it still wasn’t enough. At her insistence again and feeling like she was going to help with the balance, I took out another personal loan, putting my only vehicle up as collateral. After all, she had kept telling me that she wouldn’t let me lose everything even though that was exactly what I was facing. I had also noticed a change with her after she put her large deposit into the account.
Her texting sessions were becoming less frequent, and she wasn’t chatting as long as she was months earlier. She had to go to Los Angeles in December for business but was still promising to come to Alabama to meet me after the first of the year. By the end of January 2026, she had “ghosted” me, meaning that she vanished from the chat app we had been using.