The Sweet Talker wasn’t the only bad thing that happened to my friend Karin online. In fact it was a party compared to what happened later. This next guy was such a terrible experience it made her think seriously about giving up the online dating idea completely. I even agreed and told her it would be a good idea! Anyway, it was a few months ago. She was all excited one day and sent me a photo of this guy she just hooked up with on the date site, and this one was so AMAZING looking it even made me a little jealous. He was gorgeous, blond and tanned, like a surfer model from another planet, maybe planet HOT. Karin was walking on a cloud right away and it was no use getting her to talk about anything else. No wonder, because everything else about this guy sounded too good to be true.
She told me he was a petroleum engineer, just out of school and working on the oil rigs up in Canada. He told her his father was an oil executive and his mom was a missionary. They talked on the phone about three times a day.
This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, and it wasn’t, not yet at least. It actually made me kind of happy because Karin was so excited and focused. It was like an advertisement for online dating sometimes being like winning a lottery for some people. But I noticed right off that he didn’t seem to be asking many questions about Karin, or her life or anything. Guys can be like that, just thinking about themselves, especially hot guys, but this was strange. Still, she told me I was just paranoid, so that was it — for a week or so.
Suddenly gifts began to arrive at Karin’s place, nice gallant-gentleman gifts like chocolates, roses, big balloons and even a few teddy bears. Now she was talking about going up to Canada and never coming back, starting a family with him. Then she told me he’d called for like the fifth time that day to tell her his mom had been involved in an accident while doing missionary work in Africa and he needed to wire cash right away to make sure she was shipped back home to a hospital here. He asked her to contribute as much as she could and to ask her friends to throw in money to help. Right away after we hung up I went online to a fraud-busters blog and described the situation to people in the chat room. They kind of laughed at me and said that Karin had – almost – been the victim of a notorious online fraudster ring run from somewhere in Africa. The guy’s photo was a fake and the gifts were probably bought on a stolen credit card.
You can imagine how terrible it was to bring this news to Karin, but I did it right away. Nothing special for me or anyone else, I think, because friends have to help friends. She cut the guy off and I hope people reading this will always be careful, EXTRA careful, because who knows what’s out there anymore?