Multiple Faces Detected
May 4th, 2022
When it comes to romance scams, many people are perplexed. The most difficult thing for most victims to understand is why someone would go through so much trouble to deceive them. Why their money is so much more important than their humanity, and why even though they found out that they are talking to a deceiver, their scammers maintain such a powerful hold on them.
This week, we talked to Lissa from Kentucky, a woman who met a man named Micheal online on Facebook who claimed to be in the military, stationed in California.
Lissa had been romance scammed before, so she knew the signs to look for to tell if she was talking to a romance scammer. When she pressed Chris on whether or not he was who he claimed to be, then everything unraveled, and the mystery was solved.
Chris sent Lissa a picture of who he really was, and he came clean about the fact that he was a romance scammer. He told her that he was a Nigerian student and that he couldn’t find a job in his country. He told her about the rough conditions that drove him to have to scam in the first place.
Lissa spent her professional life working with young people and guiding them through their troubles in life, so Chris’s true story and the realities of the conditions he was born into moved her. She was unable to hold any resentment towards him, and she forgave him and kept daily content with him.
Before long, more and more scammers reached out to her trying to lure her into a romance scam. One by one, she disarmed them with her caring and compassionate nature. And one by one they all abandoned their false personas and came clean, revealing their real faces, and their real-life stories.
Lissa built a relationship with each and every one of these scammers. She learned about their unique struggles and what drove each of them to scam women online. Her relationship with them becomes much different than what it was originally intended to be. Rather than being romantic, it became one of care and compassion. All of the scammers began to refer to her as ‘mom’.
She kept in contact with all of the young Nigerian men every day. She acted as a mother to all of them. Giving advice, providing an audience, and being a compassionate ear to listen to the problems they experienced in their real lives.
The with Chris. Chris was a man who claimed to be an engineer living in California. He reached out to her on Facebook and began to start a relationship with her.
Throughout the relationship, Lissa was confused. Because of her motherly relationship with the young Nigerian men, she knew what a romance scam looked like. She knew what it feels like when you were in the middle of a romance scam, and most of all, she knows what romance scammers tell you to entangle you in their patterns of deception.
Chris had a Facebook account with a sizable following. He also had a long list of women commenting on all of his posts, and they all appeared to be a real women.
This deepened her confusion. She tried to confront Chris and tried to get him to come clean, and reveal himself like all of the other men she met online, but he insisted that he was real. But the patterns remained.
Lissa turned to Social Catfish for answers. Click the video below to see the truth.
