Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/Courtesy of Ruth Grover
Earlier this month, in Northern California, a lovelorn woman waited for a package that would never come. Janet, as we’ll call her, because she didn’t want her real name used, had recently fallen for a handsome Turkish doctor she met online.
He told her he loved her and promised to come visit her, just as soon as he was done with his assignment in Yemen. But first, could she help him? His bank was shuttering and he needed to get a box full of gold bars and cash safely into the United States. The box was worth an estimated $6 million, and if she helped him transport it, the riches were theirs.
The box, of course, never came; the riches did not exist. Her lover was not an international doctor but a romance scammer, who was probably professing his love for a dozen other women at the same time. Janet didn’t realize this until two years into her ordeal, when she logged onto Facebook and saw someone with a different name using his exact same photos. By that time, she had already spent more than $200,000 on her fake lover and his sham package—some of it out of her 12-year-old son’s savings. And she was furious.