Hi all,

It's been a busy month at the SOTH email group and chat room.  I'd like to welcome 60+ new members in the past 30 days -- wow.  The scammers must be getting dumber, because you all are a very bright group.  I love, love, love the support I'm seeing you give each other. 

We've had lots of changes internally in the past month. Cindy has decided to leave the group to pursue other interests, and while she is missed, we of course wish her well.  We hope her photography ventures bring about the desired change in her life.  

Share has had some major changes in her world as well, and may not be as active as before, but she is checking in and holding her head high.  When the dust settles, she'll be back and better than ever!  What doesn't kill us really does make us stronger. 

Finally, I'd like to welcome two new moderators in training to the gang.  Shirley is our resident songstress, a founding member of SOTH, and has lots of wisdom to share with us.  I had the pleasure of meeting Denise in person in August, and while she's still a bit wet behind the ears, I have a gut feeling that she's going to be a mighty powerful advocate for our members. It won't take either one of these wonderful ladies much time to get up to speed -- i can see their lovely hands at work already.

A sneak preview into October:  it's my hope that we'll be able to welcome a mod for our "Euro's" (Our European members) soon.  Stay posted. . .

Best,
Mary W

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

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

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

We all know Neil Sedaka's song about how hard it is to break up with someone we love.  We fall in love for all sorts of reasons and many times it is one-sided at best.  When both partners have declared their undying love for one another, the breakup that follows can feel as though you have been totally destroyed forever.  But what about when you find out that the person who has sworn to love you and marry you turns out not to even be real?  Oh there are times when we start to figure out that someone we know personally wasn't really the kind of person we thought they were.  But in a Nigerian type romance scam, it's a totally different scenario.  And unfortunately, even your best friends or family members may never understand what you are going through or how it could ever have happened to you in the first place.  That is, unless it happens to them too.  

All of us believe we are too savvy to get caught up in something online so sinister and devious as a romance scam.  But it is often just that kind of thinking that gets us trapped even deeper, or keeps us trapped because we just don't want to admit to ourselves or our loved ones that we had been fooled so badly.  Does this make us fools?  Hardly!  These scammers are so good at their "jobs" of convincing us they are really who they claim to be that it is hard for us sometimes to dispute what they say.  They have photos, Facebook and MySpace profiles, hefty friends' lists complete with family members listed, and lots more.  They sometimes have their webcams that just don't work right but for those brief moments you can see something in the cam that looks like the photo they sent you.  It just has to be real!  Or does it?

So, okay, you now realize that this person you thought was real, might not be real after all.  What do you do now?  It's break-up time.  It's that time in the relationship where you have to say your good-byes.  Only this time, it's not because you caught your real guy cheating on you or that you just fell out of love.  It's not that you were arguing all the time or your paths were just not going in the same directions anymore.  No, this time it's that this other "person" you have given your heart to doesn't even exist anywhere on the planet!  It's like reading a romance novel and falling in love with the hero or heroine of the story.  It's like falling in love with a movie character portrayed by a good looking actor.  It's just not real at all.  Only it's much much worse than any of that.  This "person" was responding to you, carrying on an ongoing conversation with you for weeks, maybe months or even a year or more.  This "person" was so perfectly matched for you and you couldn't believe how wonderful they were...except suddenly they started having little financial problems that grew bigger and bigger, and only you could help them.  They depended totally on you because no one else could take care of those problems.  Your love depended on your help and if you didn't help you were made to feel horribly guilty.  And afraid.  What would happen to this love of your life if you didn't do something to help when they needed you the most?  What if they died?  Or ended up in jail?  Or could never get home to you?  So of course you did what you could to help.  And then everything comes crashing down on you and you find out that the love of your life was nothing more than a set of stolen photographs, webcam videos, and a lot of well-written lines of love. Oh okay, maybe not so well-written. 

What happens when you find yourself breaking up with nobody?

What happens when you find out the beautiful woman you were falling in love with was just a group of young black men in Nigeria or Ghana pretending to be this woman? 

What happens when this too-good-to-be-true man you counted on to be your husband turns out to be a wisp of smoke, a character out of your worst nightmare come true?

The day you realize you have no choice but to delete and block this person from all further contact online and by phone is the day you feel like everything inside you just died.  Breaking up with a ghost.  How do you do that?  Especially a ghost who won't let you go?

The moderators and members of Scams of the Heart understand what you are going through.  We've all been through it ourselves.  Some of us have lost great sums of money while others have lost nothing more than their self-esteem and ability to trust others.  All of us have had our hearts broken no matter what else happened.  We've all had to deal with friends and family members who just don't understand.  Many of us have had the unhappy experience of waiting for a love at the airport only to realize nobody was going to show up. Just another ghost of a relationship that never really existed. Many have paid for medical bills for procedures that never took place. Some have bailed their lover out of jail when there was no lover and no jail to be bailed out of.  Others had the difficult experience of getting involved with a real person who only wanted to get a green card out of the relationship, or maybe even more than just the green card.  Some of us have paid for actual real medical treatments for real people who only used us for what they could get out of us before we figured them out.  But one thing we all have in common is this.  The relationships were not real.  

Everyday we learn of new ways these romance scammers con us into believing they love us only to find out they are actually after our money or other benefits. This is Halloween season, the season of ghosts and ghouls and other things that go bump in the night. If you are dealing with a ghost of a romance scam, let us help you.  Halloween is just the beginning of the biggest holiday season of the year with Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the other holidays around the world taking place in the next couple of months.  We know how the scammers use these holidays to make promises to come "home" to us and be a family.  Don't go wait at the airport for a ghost this year.  Come talk to us in the chat room, or join our email group if you are more comfortable with that.  Either way, we are here for you.   cp