The Guy I Was Talking To Online Was A Romance Scammer. Here’s What Tipped Me Off — And How I Turned The Tables On Him.

When Facebook Dating served me up both an international pilot and a mega-bucks currency trader in the same week in 2021, I should have known they were too good to be true.

But I was a tad naive, as I’d spent the last seven years meeting someone/having children/splitting up and then neck deep in single parenting. But now I was ready to get back to having a dating life. My previous experience of online dating in 2012-13 was pre-dating apps. I’d met more than a handful of decent guys, some of whom I had relationships with, some who became friends.

Back then, talking online was genuinely just a step in the process of actually meeting in real life. In this new swiping era, it seemed that hanging out on the app having pointless conversations was the end goal. It was so boring. I wanted to go on actual dates on my rare days off from motherhood. But, although app dating hadn’t been very successful, I hadn’t encountered anyone who was obviously misrepresenting themselves before.

The Turkish pilot supposedly based near the Spanish city where I live never wanted to meet in person, so that trailed off pretty quickly. But the trader was chattier, and the conversation soon moved off Facebook and onto WhatsApp, which I’d found to be a pretty standard progression in the endless chatting game.

I didn’t suspect the fakery when he claimed a fiancée and unborn child were killed in a car crash, though it did make me feel a bit awkward. It seemed like a lot to reveal in the first couple of days of messaging, and I didn’t really know what I was supposed to say. I didn’t even catch on when he sent screenshots of his five-figure trades and asked me if I was “making much money as a writer.”

Instead I was intrigued. I told him how I’d messed