Before recognising she was being conned that the relationship wasn’t real, a woman paid her false boyfriend $80,000 (£61,000).
You’ve probably heard of “catfishing.” No, not the kind of catfish when someone steals a person’s photo from the internet and poses as that person.
As long as everyone agrees that the name refers to a method of deceiving people online using a false identity, it has nothing to do with shipping cod across the Atlantic Ocean. The more you attempt to explain it, the less sense it makes.
Let’s return to the woman who paid tens of thousands of dollars to a man she had never met and who didn’t exist now that that has been clarified.
Terri initiated a conversation with a man who identified himself as Ricardo on Facebook Messenger.
Although he was from Los Angeles, his job kept him in Montreal, Canada, so they couldn’t meet. He claimed to be wealthy and looking for someone to spoil.
They got along well right away, confessing their love to one another and spoke on the phone several times every day.
After roughly a month of dating, Ricardo asked Terri for $10,000 (£7,600) to invest in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and promised her she would become wealthy in six.
Over time, she sent in somewhere in the region of $80,000 while her family told her they were worried this whole thing was a scam, and tried to convince Terri about it.
She said that there was ‘always an excuse’ whenever they made plans to meet up and her sister, Tammy, took Terri onto Dr Phil, where she kept insisting that she believed Ricardo was real.
However, the show did a bit of digging into the matter and found out that Ricardo was actually a man called James who had never spoken to Terri.
Instead he was the person the catfish had stolen the photos from, and he explained that this wasn’t even the first time he’d had his likeness stolen.
In a recorded video, he told Dr Phil he’d been ‘dealing with this for over 10 years’ and hoped people would understand that his photos were being used by scammers and that it wasn’t him.
Terri, meanwhile, said she was ‘heartbroken’ to discover that Ricardo was a scammer but did say that she didn’t blame James and ‘won’t punch him out’ if she ever sees him in person.
