At the time, I was an agency-contracted software developer, considering further education, struggling with my new role as a husband. I was being besieged on multiple fronts - professional, academic and personal. I had my fingers in way too many pies as it was. And thus I did not deal with this as immediately and firmly as I might have. Also, strictly speaking, it wasn't my situation to deal with.
How it went down
Over dinner one evening, this friend of mine told me he was in love. He had met this woman online through WeChat, and she was now his girlfriend. When he showed me a picture, I was impressed. Cute, great figure. The only question was - why would she be interested in my friend? He wasn't ugly, but appearance-wise, he was no hunk. He was in his mid-forties, not particularly well-off, and I had never been under the impression that he was especially charming. Indeed, I had been laboring under the impression that he was the archetypical 40-year old virgin. |
| A pretty girl on camera. |
Still, stranger things have happened. I was prepared to be happy for my friend. Why look a gift horse in the mouth, eh?
It was about to get stranger still, however. He told me he had never heard her voice "live", only through sound clips. And whenever he tried to video call her, she never picked up. But they spent several nights chatting away (via text and sound clips) into the wee hours of the morning, and he even serenaded her with his own singing several times.
So, I was supposed to believe that he hooked her with his singing voice? A lot less believable, but maybe there was something about my friend that I, as a heterosexual male, wasn't seeing.
Of more concern was the fact that he had never interacted with her live. In this day and age of deepfake technology, even interacting live isn't such a big deal for authenticity anymore. But not even having that? Fishier than the River Nile. The words of my favorite comedian Bill Burr comes to mind.
"That's not a red flag; that's the fucking Soviet Union."
The Investment
As we spoke, my friend also revealed that his girlfriend (though I was having serious doubts about the veracity of that term by that point) had introduced him an investment site where he had already put in twenty thousand dollars of his own money, and according to him, he had already earned more than ten thousand off his initial investment. Now I'm no expert in that department, but that seemed like a decent return. Actually, it was positively too good to be true. |
| Investment site. |
He wanted to send this woman ten thousand dollars of his earnings as a gesture of appreciation. This seemed like good news - at least he could draw out his earnings, right? He had already tried to send the money, and the bank had refused to facilitate this transfer because it fit the pattern of many online scams. Thus he was wondering if he could transfer me some funds so I could affect part of the transfer on his behalf. I declined, not because I was against him sending money - that was frankly none of my business - but because, in principle, I am deeply uncomfortable with anyone messing with my account. Eventually, later on, he finally managed to send the money, in three separate installments.
I had a look at the site. And then I Googled it. What came up was, well, more red flags. Apparently this site was being flagged for suspicious activity. When I pointed it out, my friend said that he was aware. That figured; he was a grown-ass man and he could do his own damn Google search, right?
My initial reaction
If you're anything resembling a normal person, reading this, your inbuilt danger alarm must be ringing like mad by now. There were way too many things about his story that stank. In fact, the entire story stank. It reeked like an open sewer. It sounded like my friend was getting in dangerously deep and needed a reality check.But from whom would that reality check come? Me?
 |
| Don't stick your hand into that fire! |
In all honesty, I chose to deal with my own immediate problems and largely left it to my friend's common sense to help him navigate this potential minefield. After all, it wasn't like I had any personal experience with pursuing online romances - what did I know, really?
Sure, I could have said something. Anything. I could have pointed out how ridiculous all this sounded. But would I be pointing out anything he himself didn't realize and didn't want to admit to himself? Would I be saying anything that his mother and siblings had not already been saying? Why would he listen to me, if he was already ignoring their counsel? With that in mind, would talking actually accomplish anything, or would it just be talking for the sake of talking?
I'm a software developer. What kind of software developer does something for the sake of achieving nothing? A fucking useless one, that's what.
No. If I was going to say anything, I was going to have to do better than just talk. I was going to have to present evidence of some sort. Thus, I wished him the best of luck and went on my way. I did eventually discover evidence, but it was too little, too late.
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