My story

by Carlann
(Pennsylvania)

I received a friend request from some guy on Facebook claiming to be Richard Frank. He said he lived in California but was currently in the UK building a shopping mall. He also claimed to be a widower with an eight year old daughter named Catherine. We communicated every day through Facebook and through email.

He soon told me that he loved me and we were going to be married. Some of the things he said to me were so sickening sweet, I could have gotten diabetes just from reading it! At one point I asked him if he wanted to video chat, but he said he couldn't because he dropped his phone at the work site causing it to malfunction. After talking for two weeks, he said he had a financial problem he hoped that I could help him with.

He said he had an 800,000 dollar paycheck waiting for him from his previous job of doing road construction in South Africa. He asked if I would be willing to have the money transferred into my bank account, then have it transferred into his account. At first I said yes, and he said he was going to call the bank and tell them that his "wife" was going to help him with the transaction.

He then dropped the subject after I kept coming up with excuses why I couldn't do it. After a few more weeks of communicating, he told me that he got an emergency phone call at work telling him that his daughter was sick and had to be rushed to the hospital. He later told me that she was diagnosed with leukemia but the doctor refused to treat her unless he gave him a huge amount of money.

He asked if I could send him money to pay the doctor, stating that she was his only child and that he would be devastated if anything happened to her. At first I said yes, and he gave me a name and an address of a woman in Africa to wire the money to. Soon after that I began giving him excuses why I couldn't do it.

He sent me a nasty email telling me that his daughter was near death and that I told him I would send him money but so far I didn't.

I emailed him back and said "Dear Richard, do you like poetry? Roses are red, violets are blue, your daughter is not real, and neither are you!"

I then deleted my email account and blocked him on Facebook. I did a reverse search on Tineye and discovered that the man in the picture is actually a politician who lives in Pennsylvania named Mark. I also highly suspect that my scammer was actually a woman named Boitumelo living in South Africa, because when she first contacted me on Facebook, she was using her real profile with the name and picture of a man instead of making up a fake profile like scammers usually do.