“I Considered Suicide” Says This Victim

This story, shared with us last week by the victim and her daughter, is heartbreaking not only because of the financial loss to the victim and her daughter, but also because this breach of trust was so emotionally devastating that the poor woman blamed herself and considered suicide. We’ll call the victim “Karen” to protect her identity. We are grateful to her for allowing us to share her story with the world and want to acknowledge and thank her daughter who helped us write it. When the victim first contacted us, the first thing she said to us was “About 3 years ago, in early 2022, I received an unexpected message on Facebook from a man who complimented my beauty. At a time when I was feeling old, alone, and fragile, his words were what I desperately needed to hear.” We are very familiar with the tricks used by her scammer but the victim was not. He manipulated her to give him more than $1,300,000, and it completely ruined her life. This is Karen’s story.

Karen, an immigrant who moved to the United States with her daughter in search of a better future, worked tirelessly, foregoing vacations and leisure activities to ensure their safety and well-being. She prided herself on being a good citizen, dedicating her time to work and volunteering to help senior citizens. Her only sources of joy were attending church and her volunteer work. After her daughter graduated and moved away, Karen felt a profound loneliness resulting from her lack of family and friends around her.

In January 2022, Karen received a message from a stranger on Facebook. The man, who claimed to be an American citizen named Allen Larson from Chicago, complimented her and made her feel loved at a time when she felt old, alone, and vulnerable. He also shared his heartbreaking story with Karen of losing his family in a tragedy, and that deeply resonated with her. Their conversations quickly transitioned to phone calls, and within a month, he proposed to her. When Karen asked to meet him in person, he said he had to rush to California for a major business deal involving his company, which he claimed could change their future. Skeptical, Karen shared this with her daughter, who immediately warned her that the man was a scammer.  Her daughter advised her to stop communicating with him and report him to the police if he asked for money. But Karen had already been so manipulated by this fraudster that she ignored her daughter’s advice and continued to trust this man. Allen Larson even convinced Karen that her daughter was jealous and urged her not to share anything more with her daughter.

Despite having never met in person, Allen Larson painted a beautiful future for Karen, eventually asking for her personal information, including her Social Security number and driver’s license photo. He even requested full access to her bank accounts. One time, Allen shared a bank link with Karen, telling her “Go to my account. You have full access because you are my love and I trust you. Transfer money to Emily Caparas.” When Karen clicked on the link, it showed that his bank account was blocked. When she mentioned this to Allen, he started to cry and said, “Right now, I need to buy machines for the oil company, but my account is blocked. So send money to Emily and I’ll pay you later.” Though Karen didn’t know Emily, she trusted Allen and sent her own money, $180,000.00.

Romance scammers always use stolen photos off the Internet (though sometimes we’ve suspected they also pay someone to generate and use their photos!) The scammer pretending to be Allen Larson used photos of an actor from Poland named Marciej Orlos. (Marciej Orlos’ Insagram account) Below is one of the photos sent by this scammer to his victim….

Allen Larson claimed to be a wealthy businessman from Chicago who owned a successful company. This is, of course, exactly the type of narrative that many romance scammers use when targeting and grooming their victim. As part of their fictional narrative and showing their victims how caring they are, they create a story meant to trigger deep emotional feelings for the scammer. This is part of the grooming phase of their fraud. We want victims and their families to understand that the victim should never, ever blame themselves for what they’ve suffered, though most do. We strongly advise them to seek therapy to help them navigate and overcome their emotional pain, guilt and self-loathing that often follows these terrible circumstances. They should reach out to friends and family members who will help support them, and not blame them. 

The company that Allen Larson said he owned had just won a multi-million dollar contract with the Italian oil company called Eni SPA. That meant that Allen was flying to California and would be away for some time, shortly after meeting Karen. This is also a critically important part of romance scammer’s narrative! As proof of what Allen told Karen, he sent her a photo of the official contract showing the work he was engaged in with Eni SPA. However, when we looked at this official “Contract Award Certificate” we saw MULTIPLE red flags that this certificate was a forgery. Even Karen’s daughter thought this contract was suspicious. It included incorrect grammar, a bogus “red seal” on the bottom, and missing printed names of the signees at the bottom of the contract.

As Allen Larson began work for his fake contract, he concocted a story that the government had blocked his (fake) account and that he needed money urgently to pay his employees. Desperate to help, Karen sent him her own money and continued to do so for various reasons because she was in love with him and trusted him. Ultimately she almost became homeless as a result. Once Karen had depleted her savings, this scammer persuaded her to sell her apartment and car. He then asked her to borrow money from her daughter, promising to repay it from a check worth $2 million that he actually sent to her to hold onto. The check was a fraud, as the police later informed her.  This check was supposedly from a company called “N&D Company,” showing an incomplete address at “1117 Repubblika valletta.” The company doesn’t exist. The bank name on the check was Vergeshore. Vergeshore Bank is one of many hundreds of fake banks that are listed on The Daily Scam.com! Every check begins with a routing number. According to the American Bankers Association, there is no such routing number as “00008502.”

NOTE: It turns out that Allen’s bank wasn’t blocked by the government, it was removed because of fraud.

Confused and concerned, Karen’s daughter questioned why her mother needed to borrow money from her.  Karen asked for $70,000. This was her daughter’s entire savings! Her daughter tells us that this was the first time her mother had ever asked her for money and pressured her for the financial help. Despite her suspicions, Karen’s daughter emptied her bank account and sent the money to her mother. Karen immediately wired the entire amount to Allen Larson. Allen told Karen that he wanted to rent a plane to come to Chicago and visit her and he couldn’t simply travel with an economy class ticket! For another year, Karen continued to be groomed and manipulated to send her entire monthly salary to this scammer until she could no longer pay her own bills. When her daughter began questioning the missing money, Karen finally confessed that everything was gone. Feeling betrayed, her daughter was devastated. Karen reported the case to the police and the FBI, but after a year of no progress, it was classified as a cold case. That’s when Karen decided to share her story with us to raise awareness and warn others who might be in a similar vulnerable position. 

SCAMMER TRICKS: 

• Of course, Allen Larson could not meet Karen in person, even though he said he loved her and had proposed to her after a month. There was never any in-person get together, nor even any video chats! 
• Allen Larson claimed to be away working with the oil company on his project. And, as always happens with these types of scams, problems developed for which he desperately needed Karen’s help! She told us “he informed me that the government had blocked his funds, leaving him in urgent need of money to pay his employees. To reassure me, he sent me a check for $2 million. Unfortunately, I later (just when I reported the case to the FBI) discovered that the check was fake.”
• Fake businesses, and their websites, are a common tool used by these scammers
• Fake checks and fake banking websites are a common tool used by these romance scammers.
• Fake arrest and needing money to get bailed out of jail

WHY WAS THIS SCAMMER SO SUCCESSFUL?

Before our readers think to blame the victim for not being smart enough to see through this man’s fraud, consider this… This type of fraud manipulates a fundamental need of nearly ALL human beings. Nearly ALL of us have a desire to connect with others and build trusting, caring, loving relationships! Human beings are hard-wired for this! (Unless something has severely broken this human need in someone.) And being human also means we make mistakes! We shouldn’t say things like “How did she/he miss the warning signs?”  Loneliness is awful and the desire to connect with another human being is a very powerful incentive. Victims are taken advantage of because their need to connect to others is likely stronger than most at this moment in their lives. They are often very lonely and feeling empty. Many are also recent widows/widowers or divorcees. They shouldn’t be judged for these mistakes they make in their effort to connect to others. Let’s show them empathy, and through their stories educate others how these scammers operate and how to identify their tricks! 

Keep in mind, too, that often their new “trusted” partner (i.e. the scammer) is grooming them and manipulating them NOT to trust their family regarding the new relationship. Karen confirmed this when she told us “Throughout this, my daughter warned me about his true nature from day one when I told her that I am talking to a guy that I like! She looked at the oil contract and right away called me and said this is fake! Right away, I stopped sharing any news from him with my daughter because he said so! I was in denial! I ignored all of the red flags!” Unfortunately Karen deleted nearly all of this scammer’s messages, emails and most other documentation about this man’s fraud. She also said that all the money requests he asked of her occurred over the phone (verbally). Below are the only examples of communication from this scammer that Karen had kept and was able to share with us…

Eventually, after years of struggle over her loss of more than $1.3 million dollars, she reported the case to the police. But the police said that this fraudster was likely in Nigeria and that the police could do nothing.  Still, we told her this was an important step in documenting this fraud and for her healing process. Though Karen was unable to tell us all the details of how this scammer tricked her into sending him money, her financial loss was significant. She said “I had sent around $200,000 in cash via FedEx to an address in Pennsylvania, based on one of his requests, but the authorities informed me that they couldn’t pursue it further since that is a location out of [US STATE REDACTED].”  

Demonstrating how deeply victims of this type of fraud may suffer, Karen also told us “The impact of this experience still weighs heavily on me, and I often find myself battling thoughts of suicide.”  Considering how painful this experience has been for her, we applaud her effort to tell others about it. We believe the best way to reduce this type of fraud is to tell others about it so they can also understand the tricks used by these horrible people who victimize others. Karen also said “The photos he sent me turned out to be of a real, famous person, indicating how he manipulated my trust. Is there a way that you can help me to pursue my case? My daughter asked me to contact you! I appreciate your understanding as I share this difficult chapter of my life.” 

Unfortunately, we had to tell Karen and her daughter that there is nothing we can due to “pursue her case” other than telling her story to our readers around the world. At the start of this article, we mentioned that eventually Karen learned that the scammer, disguised as Allen Larson, stole and used photos of the actor from Poland named Marciej Orlos. Just over a year ago, Karen actually reached out to this actor to confirm that it wasn’t with him that she had her relationship, and she also warned him that his photos were being misused by fraudsters.  He was kind enough to reply, and confirmed the truth behind this fraud.

Before we end this story, we want to point out the two biggest red flags that are critically important for everyone to understand about this fraud, including a victim’s family…

• The biggest red flag by far that your new romance interest is a fraud is that your new friend is unable to meet you in person or unable to have a clear, uninterrupted video chat with you for longer than a few minutes!  (AI has now made it possible for some clever scammers to manipulate stolen videos, but they are still poor quality and generally shorter than 10 minutes.) Victims should know that it is not an acceptable substitute for your new friend to SEND YOU videos of him/her.  Lengthy video chat communication between two caring people that is LIVE, in real time, where the lips and voice are in-sync and you can clearly see the person is required!

A second BIG red flag is when a friend whom you’ve NEVER met in person asks you for a favor, or for help to get them out of a difficult situation, AND it usually means asking you for money, directly or indirectly! (e.g. you may be asked to complete a task on their behalf and discover that you have a pay a tax or fee to do so.) Their “asks” typically start with small amounts of a few hundred dollars and then they grow to thousand dollars as does the urgency of their difficult circumstances.

Also, just last week, this Reddit member posted his story about talking to a (pig butchering) scammer for four months in an online relationship. His new love interest was recommending crypto investing to him. Fortunately, this man didn’t take the bait but his short story was interesting to read considering he was almost a victim! For more information about pig butchering fraud, check out this OUTSTANDING Spotify podcast titled “Who’s behind these scammy text messages we’ve all been getting?” published in March, 2024 by PJ Vogt. Also, check out this article on the German News Media called DW. The article is “How Chinese Mafia are Running a Scam Factory in Myanmar.”  Or this article about a widow in Illinois who lost her life savings to this type of fraud! Read….

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/illinois-widow-loses-1m-life-savings-and-is-forced-to-sell-her-home-after-brutal-pig-butchering-scam-how-to-spot-this-scheme-and-protect-your-financial-future/ar-AA1rsAVq

Last week we posted a story about the appearance of multiple fake ads on websites and social media. We found a discussion about this type of fraud on Reddit recently and felt that these two comments perfectly sum up our feelings about these malicious ads across social media sites, especially Facebook!

Earlier in October, professional scambaiter Rob was in an email conversation concerning a compensation payment due to him from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Never mind that he has never suffered any loss or harm in his state from climate change, hurricanes or other related catastrophe. What is rather odd about this fraud is that the latest email, sent to Rob on October 4, came from a shipping company that was going to be shipping him the money. That’s not how emergency relief works! But we would like to point out that the domain for this shipping company, Vanguard Logistics Courier, is vanguardlogisticscourier[.]com, and was registered less than 4 months earlier! Before June 14, it didn’t exist. Fortunately, Scam-Detector.com doesn’t think too highly of this site either!

Speaking of Rob, he’s been quite busy lately. On October 4 he received another email about a Covid Releif Payment from the United Nations! On October 7 he was informed that his relief payment was significantly more than you might expect. He was promised $15 MILLION DOLLARS! But there was one important red flag that our friend Rob is smart enough to notice. Instead of the email coming from UN.org, the official website for the United Nations, his United Nations email came from a website shown as un.supportdept[.]org. In this domain “un.” is actually a subdomain and unimportant. The actual domain is supportdept[.]org. It was registered in Nigeria just 3 days before he received their email! Already, Scam-Detector and ScamAdviser consider this domain to be untrustworthy!

All kidding aside, Nigerian fraud has a significant impact on people across North American, the UK and other countries. Reporter Erica Johnson, from the CBC, was targeted by a Nigerian Romance Scammer and managed to get this man to speak with her about the fraud he engaged in. We recommend that you read her very interesting article about this man’s fraud, as she documents many of the tricks used by these criminals:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/go-public-romance-scams-1.7088334

Additional articles that may interest our readers….

Were you aware that the Marriott company suffered a data breach? Read what the Marriott Data Breach means for consumers….

https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/10/marriott-data-breach-settlement-what-it-means-consumers

Another person on Reddit reported the same job scam that we reported from victims on September 11 and October 2!  It is successfully spreading across the US and other countries!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1fwudt3/i_got_scammed_by_telegram_group_i_took_a_loan_for/

Don’t fall for “Credit Card forgiveness” scams! (Source: CNET) https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/credit-cards/dont-fall-for-credit-card-forgiveness-scams-watch-out-for-these-10-red-flags/

Remember to check our newest podcast that was released yesterday! It is very timely and focused on job fraud. Our special guest is Tony Fogel, the President and co-founder of TriSearch, a job recruiting agency. He’s seen more than his fair share of job scams and shares his thoughts with us! https://www.securewon.com/resources/podcasts/

Phishing From Gmail & Weirdly Written Phone Numbers!

For months now we’ve been talking about phishing scams coming from free Gmail accounts pretending to represent known businesses. As antispam servers try to improve how they identify and remove this type of fraud from hitting your inbox, we’ve also been seeing a growing effort from scammers to disguise their fake phone numbers!  Check out how these cybercriminals have displayed their scam phone numbers in these next 3 emails. THIS IS NOT NORMAL! These disguises are ONLY used by scammers!

Please report your smelly phish to us and Google! https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/

Social Security Statements and Walmart Products

Often, fraudsters directly target Americans over the age of 63, especially if they are taking their social security benefits. Take this fake email, for example. It was NOT sent from ssa.gov, the official website for the US Government Social Security Administration. It was sent from the domain msgsndr[.]org. Our guess is that this domain is some type of marketing service that is being misused by fraudsters. There are recent complaints against this domain filed on Spam.org. Most importantly, the email asks you to download and review your SS Statement on ssa.gov.  BUT it is critically important to mouse-over a link and LOOK BEFORE YOU CLICK IT! This link appears as ssa.gov but mousing over it shows that your click will send you to a hacked website at LoyalFriendsPetCremation[.]com!  We’ve notified this cremation service that they have been hacked and misused. We hope they are able to clean out this threat and keep these criminals off their website!

We often remind our readers that details matter! Take, for example, this email that wants you to believe it is a link to an article about Walmart products that are going to be removed from shelves. The subject line is written in awkward English as “Walmart Won’t Bring These 11 Products Anymore_” This isn’t correct phrasing and notice the underscore after Anymore in the subject line. Before you consider clicking the link to “Say Goodbye to These Products!” look at the location of the agency supposedly hired by writers of this article.  It is ROMANIA! Why would anyone in the US hire a marketing agency in Romania to promote this?  Moreover, we’ve seen this same marketing agency many times before and wrote about this suspicious agency in our September 25 Top Story called Attacking America’s Democracy Through Fraud. DO NOT CLICK on suspicious articles like this one, especially if that Romanian Agency appears at the bottom!

Detecting Hidden Redirects and Weird Hidden Prose!

One of our longtime readers sent us the email below on October 10. It appeared to be a notification from Microsoft about her Office 365 login. However, she’s very savvy and knew immediately this was a fraud. What was unique, however, about this fraud is that the link for “COnfirm Credentials” contained TWO redirects designed to hide your final destination when clicked. We want to show our readers how to spot these hidden redirects. The link looks like it points to TikTok but if you continue scanning across the link you’ll see it shows “target=www.google.com.”  This means your destination is not TikTok, but a Google page.  HOWEVER, when we copied and pasted that very long link into a text document for analysis, we recognized that this encoded link contained a second redirect to a website called savaglioviaggi[.]com[.]ar in Argentina. ​​This Argentinian website has multiple redirects connected to it, which is never a good sign! Trust us when we say…Your Office 365 login doesn’t start at TikTok and end up in Argentina!

(For those coding nerds out there who share our excitement over this discovery, a great resource to DECODE an ENCODED link, making it easier to read/understand, is URLDecoder.org.)

The savvy woman who sent us the above email, also sent us this VERY odd malicious clickbait! We routinely tell our readers NEVER, EVER click on attached files that end in htm, html, shtml, js, php, or bin.  When we put on our hazmat suits and jumped into our bunker to analyze this attached htm file, we were surprised as hell to see that the majority of it was lovely prose! It included lines like “He wrote a poem about the beauty of nature,” “…created a masterpiece with fresh ingredients,” and “the flowers bloomed beautifully in the garden.”

Uh…..Do scammers like to read stuff like this??? Whatever. Now delete.

Canadian Customs Parcel Delivery

On October 7, a Reddit Member from Canada posted this text shown below and asking the community if they thought this was a scam.  The Canadian Postal Service does NOT use the domain seen in the link: PostCanadaLXA[.]top.  ANYTIME you see a domain ending in DOT-top, you should assume it is malicious! That domain was registered about 10 days earlier in China. ‘Nuf said!

A very savvy accountant shared this text with us that he received last week. It wants you to think it came from an AI service run by Charles Schwab. But, in fact, the link points to a very malicous website at t2m[.]io! This site has been identified as malicious by PhishTank.

As we continue to see, over and over, online work-from-home job scams are still exploding on people’s phones! They begin with an incoming text from some company or recruitment agency and they ask you to contact someone via WhatsApp text. I have personally received 3 of these in just 4 days!  I started to have a conversation with Jessica but, oddly, she never responded to the last thing I said to her!

Until next week, surf safely!

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