Some of Those Things That Make No Sense

by Soraya

You have just learned the relationship that captured your heart and soul was not a relationship, but a calculated scam. It is a confusing time, made all the more confusing by the strange things you feel compelled to do. Some of those things may feel wrong or harmful on the surface, but will be an important part of your healing from the pain of the scam. Others sound like they'll bring you comfort, but will only add to your own pain.

　


Two Things That Feel Harmful But Will Help
　


Joining a Group Designed for Scam Victims

When you first see the Scams of the Heart page, you may have a lot of questions, but you may also be reluctant to log into the chat or join the online board. "I don't want to sit around discussing the scam. It will just make me dwell on it," is a common thought. It is okay to feel this way, but SOTH (and any other reputable support group) will not force participants to do anything they find upsetting. You are welcome to join only to ask questions about scams. There is no obligation to attend regular sessions, befriend anyone you meet in the chat room, or perform any of the tasks you read about on this web page. Joining a group, whether it be for a day or two or becoming a regular chatter for several years, provides the opportunity to be open and honest about the scam in an environment populated by people who understand what you are going through.

　


Learning All You Can About Scams

After a scam, the last thing you may want to sit and read about or watch on television is scammers, but it is important to understand what happened to you. Educating yourself about scams and scammers teaches you that you are not alone, helps you to avoid scammers in the future, and provides you with knowledge you can use to help others as soon as you feel ready. Read through the older articles on this web site for some basic information. There are also a few books currently available about romance scams. The MTV television show Catfish is also a popular resource for romance scam information. Just remember that Catfish is a television show. They have a huge crew researching each situation before the hosts and guest arrive and the scammers know they are on camera in front of millions of people. It is never safe for anyone else to confront a scammer. Television shows, even reality shows, are filmed to make the situation look much more positive than it may be offscreen. The hosts are nice to the scammer because they have to be for the sake of their show, and it is in the scammer's own interest to talk about how sorry they are and how much they want to be friends with the victim for real. Nobody has any idea what happened once the camera crew left or how honest the scammer is being during the followup. That said, Catfish does illustrate many of the basic red flags and encourages healing from the scam.

　


　

Three Things That Feel Comforting At First But Will Only Cause More Harm

Plotting Revenge Against the Scammer

The only true way to get revenge against scammers is to cut off their supply of victims by educating yourself and others about scams and speaking up when you see a friend or relative in a potentially dangerous situation. Sending them a nasty letter explaining precisely how you found out the romance or friendship was a scam will only provide them with notes on how to run a better scam next time. Threatening them with legal action will not phase them. If the scammer is based in Nigeria or another foreign nation, they know that the laws of your country do not apply to them. Scammers from your own country have probably made sure to do things that are unethical, but not illegal, and know you can't call the police about anything they did. Sending a message that you or a friend is coming to beat them up should also be avoided. Scammers from across the world know you cannot come to their country, find them, and attack them. All they will do is send you a virus in an email to get you back for the nasty message. Scammers from the United States could save your threatening messages and get you in trouble for making the threats. Never confront, threaten, or vow revenge on a scammer. It will only wind up hurting you. If you must plot revenge, write out a scenario in your journal, or craft a fiction story about getting revenge on scammers.....but never attempt any of the behaviors you write about.

　


Clinging to the Good Memories and Mementos

You received a beautiful piece of jewelry from a man you thought you were dating, and now somebody in a scam group is telling you to take it to the thrift store and donate it. You also don't see the harm in keeping those photos of that hot man or woman the scammer sent you, and you like that television show you started watching because it "our show." You see no reason to delete all your digital copies of it. Here is the reason: keeping anything you started or acquired solely because of the relationship that turned out to be a scam will only keep you emotionally connected to the scam. It will make it even more difficult to fully accept that the scam was not a real relationship, and you have to accept this if you ever hope to get your life back on track. Get rid of anything; links to web pages, photos, messages, plush toys, vases from flower deliveries, jewelry, clothes, makeup/aftershave, decorations, songs, movies, and foods that you either received as a gift from the scammer, obtained at the scammer's urging, or got because you thought the person who turned out to be a scammer would like it. If it is something you liked before the scam but just got more interested in because of the scammer, set it aside or modify it to remove the parts that were added for the scammer. If you have always done yoga off and on, but the scammer encouraged you to set up a home practice and you got really into it, let the yoga go for a while, or switch to a class in your community. If you've always loved to read and the scammer talked you into switching from historical romance to true crime, don't stop reading....but do stop reading the books the scammer suggested and go back to your own true tastes in literature.


Being "Positive"

It seems to be a trend these days to "just be positive." We're told to just walk away from anything that doesn't feel great all the time, ditch people without notice, and transform our whole world just by thinking happy thoughts. Neither the world around us nor the human mind is that simple. You will not heal from the scam by pretending it never happened, ignoring all the emotional and financial distress it caused, or attempting to rewrite the situation into a "bad relationship" or a "friendship with a jerk." In order to heal from the scam, you are going to have to face what happened to you and admit that there was nothing good about that situation. This does not mean deciding that your life is over, thinking you're never going to be anything but a scam victim, locking yourself in your room with a pile of junk food, and refusing to get up out of your bed. It means taking an honest look at the scam, fully accepting that it was a scam, educating yourself about scams and scammers, and taking the steps necessary to heal on all levels. These activities will not always leave you brimming with perky thoughts. But they will help you return to a state of genuine contentment and peace.

Depression

This month, I asked a few members of SOTH to write about their experiences.  This is the first of the two stories. Thank you to Darbycat for sharing her thoughts with us. -- mw

I was so very depressed after learning I was a victim of being scammed. I just could not understand what was happening to me. How could this person use me like that and how could I have allowed this to happen. I have to share how I met him and why I could not understand. I was divorced 15 years ago, remained single trying to focus on raising my children, healing myself from a 10 year failed marriage. I was not ready to put myself out in the dating world, did not like who I was and did not want to make my children go through the process of bringing someone new into there lives. Divorce just does not effect the couple, it effects the children more so than a marriage full of resentment, arguing. They feel at least my parents are together. Anyway after getting them raised and on there own and me liking who I was finally, I decided to do the online dating thing. It wasn’t that I could not meet people or interact with them, but it was the new social media way of finding a potential companion/relationship. I did my research into online dating, the supposed safe way of meeting people.. I never heard of romance scammers and it didn’t even cross my mind they were out there. I signed up to a paid dating site, had my share of mutual responses both local and out of state men. I met this man who was widower looking to get back into dating after 3 years, we conversed on that site several times before he gave me his phone number and asked to speak with me over phone. Even this went on for about a month and then we met in person, had a brief relationship before he took a job in Malaysia.I checked out his contract with whom he was suppose to work for, checked out business and made sure it was the truth. He even said he understood if I didn’t want to continue with him being so far away and for a long period of time.. We kept our relationship online and by phone for over a year, never once did he ask me for money, never asked for anything but my time and attention, we even had video messaging. It wasn’t until about a month before I found out about the scam, he was due to come back to the states, told me he over stayed his work Visa and needed to stay longer work to come up with funds. I started to receive gift cards to help him make purchases and to ship to him so he could get the extra funds. I never thought I was doing something wrong until I was visited by a Postal Inspector telling me I was being used as a mule to purchase things and reship, that gift cards were stolen from other people. You can image my shock, my slap in the face. I confronted him immediately, I was outraged. I was being prepped all along, that my so called relationship with this man was a fake.

Anxiety immediately took over, I couldn’t think, sleep, eat or concentrate at home or work. My daughter found SOTH, where I immediately went to for help. As I’ve said I did not know there was such a thing as romance scams. I wanted answers, needed know why this happened to me. I eventually had to seek Mental Health therapy. That was my eye opener to depression and how the medical field and public really did not know how to treat my type of depression. I asked how can this be? How can the medical field not know that there are people out there suffering from devastation from romance scams. Why isn’t there any adequate help and resources out there? So my search began: I found a lot of subjects on credit card scams, scams on natural disaster relief programs, financial institution scam. But not one article on romance scams. Wow that said a lot in it’s self..

We go thru a lot of emotional changes after we have learned we’ve been scammed. It is best described as we suffer a loss much like divorce, death of a spouse or end to a long-term relationship. It is similar to PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). The devastation of losing the person we thought loved us but betrayed us is overwhelming. We experience embarrassment, humiliation, our self esteem is crushed, we become angry and want revenge, we want answers to something that cannot be answered. To us we believed we were in a relationship, to them it’s just another job, we are just another person to help them in there crimes, we are not even considered a human being to them, that is why we cannot understand or find the answers. And then depression sets in to the fullest. We miss and crave the attention that our scammer gave us, the sweet words, the attention we so wanted and most of all the love we had. It is documented that 6.7% of the U.S. population suffers from some type of depression. These symptoms range from everyday struggles, the up’s and down’s of daily living to chronic mental health conditions such as Bipolar, Manic depressive and the list goes on. We all experience loneliness, hopelessness, helplessness, anxiety, sleep deprivation, lack of concentration and mental fatigue. With romance scam we reach all of these symptoms quickly in such a very short time. So that was why I was floored that our Mental Health professionals know so little of what we are going thru, why they have a hard time understanding what we are going thru. Most just want to give us medication as they do not know who to counsel us.

Most therapies tell us we need to confront what it is that is causing our pain, our depression. Find answers and begin our closure. It’s just not that simple for us as romance victims. We try to get by each day with the interaction, we try everyday to find ourselves again, we grieve, we cry and then we accept what has happened and we talk with people who share the same experience as we do.

Our healing begins by shutting out these people, by not letting them back in, we begin by educating and protecting ourselves from them, learn there language, learn who the scammers are online from the real ones. Help educate others about them. We cannot change who the social media site allow on there, money is there motivation and as long as they receive there fees they are not interested in what happens. We heal by knowing we are special people, we have large hearts, are caring people and never give up on that. We learn to like who we are again. We all have depression in our lives, some may require medication to assist us for a time and that’s okay. And we when we feel down, talk to someone in your group who understands. We all learn from every experience in life, some lessons are harder to learn from but in the end we can, we survive. We are the winners.

A Big Anniversary Celebration Is In The Works

The month of August 2012 is a big month for us at Scams of the Heart.  Our main website including the chat room officially opened on August 7, 2011 which means we will be having our first year anniversary.  And for our group, that means a party!  Not just any party, either.  We continue to have our holiday parties and member birthday parties, and sometimes parties for no particular occasion, but this anniversary party is going to be the King of Parties!  Beginning Friday, August 3rd and ending Sunday, August 12th, this party will be more than a week long celebration of memories from the past year and even before that to our goals and plans for the future of the group.  We hope all our members and friends, old and new, will join us in the fun.  We have a lot to be thankful for!

To join the fun, or to come and get help if you are involved in a possible romance scam, just click HERE.

~~cp

Romance Scams Using Fallen Military Heroes

As bad as any romance scams are, they just seem so much worse when they involve stolen photos of fallen military heroes.  Recently the parents of Army Lt. Peter Burks have sued two separate online dating websites because the fallen hero's photo has shown up on both sites.  Is it going to have to come to unsuspecting family members joining in the fight to stop romance scammers after they find their loved ones' photos plastered all over the internet in this horrible fashion?  The dating sites don't seem to care that scammers are creating fake profiles using stolen photographs.  All those nice profiles just pad the dating sites to make them look like there are so many more good looking singles out there just waiting for us to fall in love with them...just waiting on us to pay for our memberships just to be able to contact our possible new loves.  In some cases the dating sites offer their services to us for free but it doesn't change the fact that the sites are full of fake profiles and stolen photographs. 

We all feel bad about what victims go through every day because of these scammers.  We all deal with knowing that the photos we thought belonged to the person we were talking to and hoping to meet were stolen from someone and somewhere else.  We do what we can to heal from the emotional and financial damage caused by these scammers.  Some of us even think we should try to find the real people the photos belong to and let them know what is going on.  But should we?  We have to remember that these people are also victims of the scams.  Sometimes unsuspecting victims like Burks' family.  Many times these photos are just stolen from someone else's public profile.  We love to share our photos with our friends and sometimes with the world.  Military heroes' families love to showcase their loved ones' photos to honor and memorialize them.  They should have that right to do so without fear of having those photos stolen and used to harm someone else.  

When a man or woman searching for love through an online dating site finds what they believe is a real romance with a person in the military, the trust factor can be even stronger because this person is supposed to be a soldier and trustworthy.  Why would anyone think the photos are stolen and the profiles fake?  It takes digging and knowing how the military works to break through to the truth sometimes.  Now here is the other side of the scam.  Here is the family of a fallen hero finding out their son's photos were placed on dating sites without their permission (or his, of course).  How do they fight back?  Where do they go for help?  Will fighting the dating site help?  I certainly hope that this family wins this law suit.  Maybe it will help in the battle to stop dating sites from allowing Nigerian romance scammers to join with fake profiles.

Should romance scam victims try to find the real people in the stolen photos?  I still don't believe it is a good idea because it only hurts more people in the process.  But when those people do find out, then what?  Some of them may be former victims themselves and the photos they gave their scammers are now being used to scam others.  Some may just be people who placed photos on public profiles on social networks and now have opened the door to having them stolen by scammers.  No matter where the photos originally came from, the true owners of those photos are victims of the scammers.  If they find out their photos have been used in this way, it will cause pain.  When will dating sites stop accepting fake profiles from Nigerian romance scammers?  What is it going to take?

Our chat room is open, as is our email group, for anyone who is a victim of romance scams. We are here to help you heal.

cp 

 

How to Find Full Headers and Track IP Addresses in Email

Hi.  Just a brief reminder to check our Squidoo site regularly as that is where the most updates happen in information to help you learn how to be safe online from romance scams.  

The most current updates include instructions on how to find full headers and track IP addresses in emails you receive.  These instructions, along with other helpful information can be found here.

At our Squidoo site you will not only find helpful, educational information, but you will also find some fun activities to do such as taking polls.  We would really appreciate it if you would all vote on the polls.  They are completely anonymous.  

 There is also a place where you can briefly tell your story about what happened to you.  This is also completely anonymous.  

If you are on Twitter, you can join us on the Squidoo site in Twitter Storm.  

Why, you may ask, do we have all this going on at a website separate from our main chat room website?  Squidoo is a very special place online where we are able to possibly make a little money to help defray the costs of the chat website and domain name.  This is a much better method of taking care of keeping us online than to have one or two members footing the bills all the time.  How does this work?  It's simple.  There are products listed on the site that are for sale through Amazon.com and all those products are related to online dating scams.  So if you were to go to Amazon.com to buy a book about romance scams, instead of buying it directly from Amazon, you can buy it from our Squidoo site.  Squidoo itself also places ads on our site and we get a portion of all sales through those ads.  This way we get some of the profit.  It's not much, but every little bit helps. 

We also see Squidoo as a site that offers some additional fun activities.  When you visit our Squidoo site, you can also find, in addition to the previously mentioned activities, various YouTube videos showing romance scammers in action, and other romance scam videos on YouTube.  We also have some YouTube videos of some of our chat room music we like to share together.

Be sure to click the Facebook like button when you visit.  Also click the thumbs up button as both of those actions boost our points and helps us earn awards that boost our ranking in Squidoo as well as in the search engines.  One thing to know, however.  If you do click the Facebook like button, your Facebook name and profile picture will show on the Squidoo page and the link to our page will show on your wall.  Liking us does not link you to having been scammed.  It only shows that you appreciate what we are trying to do to help others.  You can also post comments on our page.  

We, at Scams of the Heart (SOTH) are family.  We want to be there for each other, and we want to be there for those who come in newly hurt by these criminals.  What we want to do with Squidoo is take the burden of the cost of our chat room off the shoulders of the one or two or three who help pay for it now.  Your regular visits help us.  Your thumbs up, your votes on the polls, the videos you watch, and especially any products you might order through our site all go toward helping us keep SOTH online.  Besides, it's fun as well as informative!  

If you have any suggestions for topics to post on the Squidoo site, please leave us a comment here, or on Squidoo, or email us at info@scamsoftheheart.org  

Thanks!

cp

Thanksgiving Romance Scams

Thanksgiving is a special time for getting together with family and friends. Unfortunately, romance scammers know this and they use it to try to move closer to our hearts.  Promises of travels to meet for Thanksgiving abound and victims go to the airports and sit and wait...and wait...and wait...until they realize nobody is going to show up.  

Then the inevitable email shows up, or the text, or phone call.  There was a delay.  There was an accident. There was a customs issue.  Whatever the problem was, they need money...your money.  And only you can help them.  They will come up with all types of scenarios that left them stuck at the airport on their end, or in the hospital, or even in jail as some have claimed, and the only way they can get home to you is if you send them money.  They might even have you talk to someone else on their behalf.  It might be a customs official, a policeman, or doctor, or nurse.  It might be a lawyer.  It could be anyone they think you would believe to help make their story more plausible.  But no matter who they say they are, they are not real.  They are part of the ongoing scam and their ultimate goal is to get more money out of you.

You are there at the airport...or maybe by now you have gone back home, disappointed and heartbroken that your love is not going to be there with you for Thanksgiving as promised.  What do you do now? "Could everyone have been right?  Is this only a scam and not real at all?  How am I going to explain this to the rest of my family who is expecting to meet him/her? They tried to warn me that it was not real in the first place.  I was going to prove it to them.  I was going to get to introduce him/her to the family in person and they would know he/she was real.  Now I can't do that.  Now he/she isn't coming after all.  Maybe they were right and it was all fake.  What now?"  All these thoughts race through your mind combined with worries about the love of your dreams.  "Could they really be real and be in trouble like they claim to be?  What if they are real and need help?  What if I am right and everyone else is wrong?  What if he/she IS REAL?"

We are so sorry if this is happening to you right now.  Many of our members have been through exactly this kind of situation.  The emotions fill you with confusion and fear along with embarrassment that you have gotten in so deep into a possible romance scam.  You don't know which way to turn except that you have to decide if you are going to believe this person one more time and take a chance on sending more money.  How do you find out if he/she is real or a scammer?  Is there really any way to know the truth?

We can help you figure it out at Scams of the Heart 

We have the tools to find out the truth.  We will also teach you these tools so you can be safe online.  We also have experienced all these same emotions and situations caused by romance scams.  We will share our stories with you and help you deal with whatever is going on in your situation.  The truth is, real people do not ask for money from people they only know online.  They do have other options to get help if they need help other than to ask someone they have only spoken to online and/or by telephone.  Romance scammers play on our hopes and dreams and emotions to get money from us.  They often take even more from us than money. 

We hope you are not waiting for anyone at the airport this Thanksgiving holiday week.  But if you are, and they don't show up because of some scenario like the ones mentioned above, come check us out.  We can help you get through this.

cp