Multiple Faces Detected
April 27th, 2022
A woman named Ruth from California was scammed out of her entire life saving on the dating app Zoosk. This story followed the classic romance scam format, but like many other unsuspecting internet users, Ruth was unable to spot the red flags that led to her being financially decimated.
Ruth was on the dating app Zoosk when she say that she had a match with a man named Juhan. They two started messaging back and forth and hit it off right away. They started messaging all day and night.
Juhan claimed to be an engineer working in Alaska. When the conversation turned to video chatting or sending pictures, Juhan claimed cameras were forbidden, and he had to sign a contract promising that he would not take any pictures of videos when he was operating on the site.
There was another thing that he couldn’t do when working on the oil rig. He was unable to access his bank account. He claimed to need ruth to sign in to a website and transfer funds for him. He then gave her access to a fake website built by scammers to display a fake bank account balance.
Once Ruth saw the account balance, she believed everything that he had previously told her. He believed that Juhan was in fact, very well of financially.
She did as he asked and transferred the funds to the account he requested. But once she pushed the transaction through, the funds were “frozen”.
Juhan reached out to Ruth in a panic. He said that that was the only account he had to live on, and because of her he would be broke and stranded in Alaska. Ruth contacted the “bank” to try to get the situation sorted out. Once she called, talked to yet another scammer whose goal was to confuse her into sending money.
Once the “transaction went through”, the fake bank claimed that there would be $96,000 in taxes that needed to be paid on the funds.
Juan claimed to not have access to the money to pay the taxes, but he claimed as soon as the money went through, he would pay her back, and go back to California so they could be together.
Ruth was constantly sending payments to Juhan. She would send thousands of dollars at a time. She sent money in the form of a gift card. She exhausted her 401k and life savings to pay what Juhan asked. She even took out personal loans to try to pay the money Juhan needed. At one point, she got a second job for the sole purpose of paying the taxes that Juan needed to get his money back.
After working, exhausting all of her life savings, and taking out two loans, Ruth finally paid for the $96,000 Juhan needed to get his money back. He told her he could finally leave Alaska and go to California to be with her.
Soon after Ruth paid off all the money, Juhan said that he was inspecting under the ship, and he saw rust along the bottom. At this point, Ruth could see the signs. She knew that he was about to ask for another large sum of money.
After sending countless payments, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, she was able to walk away.
Ruth came to Social Catfish for answers, and we were able to confirm that Juhan was a scammer, and he stole his images from an online influencer to scam people online.
How to Avoid Romance Scams
Stories like this are more common than you might think. Avoiding romance scams can be easier said than done, but socialcatfish.com is here to help. If you suspect that you or someone you know might be involved in a romance scam, use the search bar below to run a reverse image search to find out the truth.
