Nigerian romance scams are alive and kicking and still going and people are falling for it sadly
for myself I would have to say that I definitely did fall for it but I was one of the lucky ones
and I guess my intuition my instinct kept bugging me that something was right off from this from the
start most of these scammers contacting women on Instagram they do their homework they know
they're picking people who they think are single and usually they're going for someone who looks a
bit vulnerable I feel like they have some kind of prerequisite of who they're searching for
when they're looking through profiles like the person the profile photo was well liked this guy
was hot okay and he looked really nice like his photos actually looked like he was a nice person
the first thing that you should note when you're looking for a scammer especially on Instagram is
that the account will be two first names I opened his profile on Instagram and I did note that the
account was not that old like maybe a year old and I thought okay so it's not like a brand new
profile but as the message is but really like more personal like he started to tell me about his past
also another story that he told me was that he had a son and his son with I think eight years old and
I did ask him I said oh is he you know living with his mom and he said his mother left them when the
child was four years old that his son was living in a boarding school back in Arizona the fact that
his parents had died in a plane crash when he was young like a child and that's why his grandmother
had adopted him when the communication started he told me that he was a doctor and that he was an
orthopedic surgeon then I noticed that the actual messages were starting to get a little bit towards
a kind of romantic sort of way and out of the blue he asked he said to me that one day he was
going to marry me so I hadn't really had much contact with him at this stage so it did feel
a bit strange and the messages kept coming they were getting more romantic full of you know high
folk to meet each other and while that was okay I did start to feel and I'm really embarrassed to
say this that I did start to feel something like okay maybe this guy is for real kind of you didn't
really think much other I just thought okay well maybe you know this is someone I'm gonna end up
friends with or whatever but he was really strong about the romantic side of it and one day he just
out of the blue told me that he loved me and I thought that was also very strange because who
does her I realized that he was actually messaging me at certain times of the day and that would be
around the same time and I I didn't even check like what Israel's time was and it was actually
like morning when you would before you would go to work or do your rounds as a doctor and the
other was after he'd finished work at night yeah and I just kind of thought it was actually very
sweet that he was you know messaging me before he went to work and when he got back and yeah this
stage as embarrassed as I am to say I started to develop I guess some kind of attachment to
the routine that we were having but I still felt it was strange like it was almost too good to
believe and like what they say if it's too good to believe it usually is sometimes I would be talking
to him and then it would just sort of go silent and then he would come back with a very you know
loving kind of romantic kind of gesture through his words but not answering my questions and I
did even think back then hang on a minute why is he not actually answering questions about being
a doctor it wasn't so engrossed in him and waiting for him to message me at that stage but it did get
to that and that's when it got a little bit too much for me and ice and I was almost fighting what
my body was reacting to telling me to look into it further which I was that I probably wasn't doing
it enough and I still was you know rolling along with how I was feeling with him and developing
these kind of feelings for him and I asked him if there was something I could do to help with
the phone because I knew a lot about iPhones and it definitely didn't feel like the same person
that I've been speaking to all this time because his speech changed and this urgency that he had in
his voice or in his words was different to what I experienced but then I thought hmm maybe this
is you know the real him still thinking that this guy was real at this stage and to be fair actually
that that sounds about right for an iPhone repair you know possibly in Israel anyway after living
there I know these things but if he had asked me for like a thousand or two thousand or five
thousand whatever I would have just straightaway red-flagged it but he was very cunning in the
way he went about it you know no matter how much you fall for that person it was over Instagram I
decided to look at his profile again and that was when I I went into actually his followers
and who he was following I recognized a person that I knew like and I know his person and so I
decided to send her a message and just ask her she knew anything about him I noticed because I
started tracking him was that he was on Google Hangouts active but he wasn't responding to my
messages and also that he'd been quite active on Instagram throughout the day and that actually
[ __ ] pissed me off because I thought if he's not a scammer he's an [ __ ] so we're not my
friend contacted me by a Facebook I woke up and I immediately went into you know like alert mode and
read through the message and all that said was I have a question for you I hope I don't sound
paranoid she said off it'll be a Nigerian scam i straight-up that she said that and I was like oh
okay and then I mentioned his name and she said oh I remember him they got onto Google started a
search of how to check an image you know whether it's real and I came across some Google reverse
images or something it's called and that was full of his photo with several other names and scam
scam scam scam scam as much as I knew this didn't feel right in the beginning I'm obviously needed
something to just confirm it to me like really confirm it to me it's all on the internet you
just really have to know what you're searching for I was actually okay I kind of laughed out
loud when I realized it but those few days of not knowing that being highly suspicious after being
asked for the money I felt like my heart had been ripped out and that's when I knew that this guy
had sucked me in like really sucked me and that other people could have got far worse than what
I did what I took away from it was that well I I have some things like some issues that I need
to actually address here so I did spend some time you know extra time meditating on it so it kind of
made me realize that I had to believe and trust in my intuition and my instinct because so many
of my relationships when I felt like something was wrong or that something was happening and
they kept telling me that you know I was just reading into it or stop being silly or and all
these kind of things would make me feel down but I knew every single one of those relationships
ended for the things that I actually could see were going to happen so in the end I knew that
I was right and I went through a whole [ __ ] of turmoil and years of putting up with abuse because
of it on a mental and a physical level in cases for me to learn from this mistake that I have to
really believe and trust in my intuition and my instinct is the most positive thing that I could
have ever hoped to have come out of this little nightmare I hope that you've learned something
from this because I'd hate to see a situation worse than mine happen and definitely do not
give money to people and yet do your research that's all I can say good luck out there and
one thing I want you to take away from this is trust your instinct so I'll see you next time