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I worked for 12 years in a fraud control department.
This guy’s a fraudster. Your mom is being scammed.
This story is so full of red flags of internet scam. Let me emphasize: Well-known red flags.
🚩🚩🚩 He is a scammer.
🚩🚩🚩 He is a scammer.
🚩🚩🚩 He is a scammer.
My suggestion is: Make her suspicious. Make her google for all these well-known schemes. She needs to read about it herself, because she won’t listen to you. Or maybe hear these stories on YouTube from the people who have fallen before.
A man she has never met, online interaction only, being put in the bedroom of her teenage son?
All I can really say to that is ‘bro…’
I hate to say it but yes, your mom sounds like she’s gotten a bit too attached to this guy. Sounds like a common online scammer. Has she given him any money? Let me guess, he’s probably told her he just needs a little bit of money for a plane ticket and they can be together
No no no, nothing like that. He is not asking for anything himself. My mother has sent him a couple of times a few dozen dollars supposedly of her own free will, which he didn’t ask for, and he is said to be very grateful for them. He even sends her proof of purchases of what he buys with that money comparing prices and choosing the cheapest products (because the country he lives in is poor).
Until you said he sent her proof of purchase, etc, i was on the side of ‘maybe not a scammer,’ but once you said that, the alarm bells started ringing again.
Dont trust this person. His story is likely fabricated and tailored to pull at your mums heart strings. He is manipulating her. What you need is picture evidence of who this person is. Or better a video call. That will prove he is at least who he has described himself as.
It definitely sounds like a ‘pig butchering’ scam. They find someone lonely, give them a sob story, proclaim a special bond, talk to them for months, then start asking for money or pumping an investment scheme. Most likely, he would never come to your country, but rather will start saying “i need <thousands of dollars> to travel there…”
How is it worth it for someone to put in months of time for this small amount of money?
The USD goes a long way in a lot of countries and these can by no means by small amounts of money. The youtuber Kitboga does a lot of videos exposing these scammers. They usually have a few different marks going at a time and, once the relationship is built up, can receive hundreds of dollars a week, steady, indefinitely
Sometimes they get tens of thousands, like if they convince the person to invest in a fraudulent investment scheme. Also, it’s not fulltime work with one person… maybe an hour or a few a day per victim, and they do several at once. Reply to one person, reply to another one while waiting to hear back, reply to another… and sometimes the people doing the ‘work’ are merely employees working for a wage or percentage! If they’re in a country with a different scale of currency like China, Brazil or Moldova, 10,000 USD would go a lot farther than in the US.
Anyway, it’s not theoretical. Check out this Wired article for instance, or one on ProPublica. They’re basically the same as the “I’m a lonely doctor in the military in Africa” romance scams that have been going around social media for years, somewhat descendants of the famous Nigerian Prince scams.
I just realized these scammers probably have CRM software.
Just thinking back to my last sales job. I was selling stuff at about $20k per sale, and my process was typically four or so 2-hour meetings with them.
My system was all paper, but that’s just because my company sucked at providing the resources we needed. Each prospect had a paper file, and I’d track each conversation. Then on the computer I had emails and files from each person separated out, and tasks to remind me to follow up.
I just realized that, in terms of personal organization, being a scammer is identical to a sales job.
In addition to the other resources people have linked if you are interested in learning more about this type of scam take a listen to
Darknet Diaries episode 141: The Pig Butcher, it is very interesting.
