Very clever Nigerian scammer in our midst...

[damsel]

I don't know where to post this, so I'm putting it here and hope it may be of help to women on this site. I was in contact with someone who had the profile name of Morris5 (calling himself Morris Strupar) for 7 months. It was the "long scam", I guess you'd say. He was incredibly plausible, believable, and I'm still quite in shock that it was all about scamming me in the end. It was intense communication for most of that time - really intense - with the usual declarations of love, etc, and all the lovely stuff said that makes you feel good about yourself, and even in his voice (we spoke fairly often) he sounded credible. I bought a ticket to visit him in Europe (he allegedly was in England and I'm in Australia), but then he said that job had fallen through so to cancel it, as he'd got a job here in Australia which would mean we could spend more time with each other.

I lost money on that ticket, but could see the logic that it would be better. Then the long wait for him to get his visa, but not before heaps of things had cropped up that he didn't have the money for (being a "poor student") - money for his last exams, then a life-threatening illness (I think he was going to go down a track of needing to get out of England because of fearing for his life from his father in the first month or so of our contact, but I questioned his genuineness at that point and he dropped that one). I never offered money, he never asked for it, and somehow he got through these "dramas". Whilst he wasn't asking for it, I figured I had nothing to lose.

Then he had got the visa, allegedly (even sent me a copy of his ticket to show me) and was due just before Christmas. I got tickets up to Sydney and back, and one for him to visit here and then return in time for his new job. Then another drama of allegedly being chased by shark loan thugs. My heart sank - another dodgey story, and finally - finally after 7 months - he asked me to lend him money. I refused, he feigned being hurt, still had some contact for a while then told me he wasn't coming after all and now had his "dream" job in London and asked me to go and visit him there... yeah, right.. he said he's pay for a ticket. I called his bluff and said okay, if you do that, I'll come. He said he would, then I basically didn't hear from him again.

I sent a couple of emails asking him for closure on it basically, but no response. Then I discovered you can do email tracking and sent one just in case it gave me any clues. It did. He opened it and the location given of where he was, Nigeria. I was totally stunned. I didn't see that coming. Dodgey, yes, clearly, but not that. I know of another woman who has been stung too, but I don't know her details and whether he used the same persona.

For me he was using being Polish, studying at Reading Uni, being a top student and aiming at working for the United Nations... hmm......
He's probably changed his name now for his new targets, but please beware - this one is really clever and clearly capable of waiting a long time to make his big move. I'm not stupid or so desperately needed that I'd believe anything, and was always watching with a critical eye, but he is just THAT good at it - so it's not only the obvious ones on here you have to watch. I do hope he hasn't caught too many people, and I hope somehow he gets caught at gets his just deserves. I feel bad enough, but I can imagine he could have devastated others.

Another thing he did was try and isolate me as much as possible from my friends and family, devote all my time to him, and he was pushing constantly to see where my boundaries were, I think. Another thing to bear in mind if you are being similarly targeted by this creep.

[lynda]

Do not feel bad because they fool a lot of people. We have had some blogging going on in the GoCougar site if you care to check the scammer discussions going on there. Thank you for posting this because it just might help another person to not get hooked.

Peace and love.....

[wetnwild]

Sorry to hear this happened to you and even sorrier to hear that some women still fall for this. If you haven't already please be sure to report him to admin to have him removed.

[lunamor]

I'm *really* ignorant: how do you do email tracking?

[sweetprince]

damsel: Sorry to hear such sad news have met you. You may imagine how much angry I am as I am Polish.
#$#%#% F* n*!!! ##%%%$# BTW there is no 'Reading Uni' in Poland. If he is Polish, let him say: 'W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie' (without foreigner accent). #%&^@ F* n*! #@#@

lunamor: when you connect to Internet, you receive IP number. Sth like 123.123.123.123. When you login to GoCougar in GoCougar's logs there is your IP number and time you logged in. As for emails sent through gmail,yahoo mail,hotmail etc., every email has 'a header'. In a header there are: 'From: SweetPrince sweetprince@sweetprince.com, Subject: to be or not to be, Date: 31 Dec 2009' But also some technical information showing servers email went through (your mail from i.e. hotmail to gmail goes usually through 3-5 servers! - everything is logged into an email header). Also there may be (usually is) a special field in a header: 'X-Originating-From:' or similar. It's value is your IP: 'X-Originating-From:123.123.123.123'

OK, how to do email tracking. Set you email program to show full headers. For Gmail or Hotmail, there should be in Settings an option 'show full headers' or similar. When you find something like 'X-Originating-From:123.123.123.123', just go to your browser, go to: remote.12dt.com/rns and type in your number i.e. 123.123.123.123. It should convert it to something more human readable i.e.: special-computer.special-net.pl. .pl means it's from Poland Sometimes it will not convert number to a name, because not all IP numbers have names.

Anyway if you see Senegal,Ghana,Nigeria, just delete an email and DON'T ANSWER THIS MAIL AND ALL NEXT COMING FROM IT. Btw I get from time to time emails: '18-year old orphan rich virgin' or 'looking for a caucasian' etc. It's usually written they are not from Africa, but ... IP tracking shows me they are usually from Senegal or similar.

OK, I was born with a computer keyboard as my second right hand.

Sw

[lunamor]

Thanks for the thorough explanation, sweetprince

Aaarrggh I tried this for a suspect contact but kept getting "invalid address"

*mumble mumble*

[vita]

That's really awful. So sorry this happened to you and I can completely see how it could, having been on the site for a few weeks now. I'm normally a really trusting person but I find myself trusting very, very few of the people who try and talk to me so it's hard to get any kind of normal conversation off the ground. I don't just mean in terms of scamming, I mean about not believing who they say they are, what they want etc I suppose that's dating sites for you. I'm not used to them. And, really, my expectations are very low, just a few people to have an on and maybe off line laugh with.

You're brave to tell your story, damsel, for the sake of other women. It's a very natural feeling to feel stupid after a scam of any kind but we can't stop trusting others completely. Trusting someone and trying to help them are positive traits and no one should feel ashamed of that.

[lunamor]

I think the best policy is to keep an open mind, give everyone enough rope to hang themselves and keep your foot out of its way.

[sealion]

I remember getting alot of those type of scam type things... several claimed they actually grew up in the U.S. etc. then "got into trouble", "health problems," etc.
By the way, IP addresses origins, even return e-mails can be faked..but fake or not, if you get invalid addresses (because of faking) that is a red flag. There's another group discussion of this in the chit-chat area.... Ahhhh the scammers

[damsel]

Thanks for the responses. Sweetprince, he was allegedly Polish but living in England (where there is a Reading university). One thing I didn't understand was the number I called his CDMA phone on was an English prefix (the 0011 for overseas and then the 44 for England, and with English accents to say "please try again" when I couldn't get through on the phone). So if he's in Nigeria, I don't quite understand that. He had an accent, but it didn't sound African, and his English was excellent.
The email tracking I did was through something I found on the net that you can install called DidTheyReadIt (free for the first month and 10 tracks), and that's what revealed it for me as soon as he opened it.
It's not so much that I feel stupid about it, but yes, that I've been too trusting. It's actually had a huge impact on me in lots of ways, and made me feel totally violated on lots of levels. I will be closing my profile down on here as I have no wish to engage with any more men on here now (even though I'm sure there are genuine ones, I trust nobody now) and I think I'm well and truly over any interest in younger men, lovely as I'm sure most are (
And yes, I did report it to admin. I've had no notification back yet so I don't know if any steps are being taken against him, and by now he's no doubt operating under different names, photos and profiles anyway.