At the end of the workday, however, things had changed. He despondently told me that there had been a last-minute change in plans, and she was not coming over after all. I can't say I was too surprised at this news.
One week later...
There was more news. I learned that she had completely disappeared. According to my friend, she was no longer communicating with him. |
| Up in smoke. |
My friend told me that the site he had been investing in, had suddenly gone down, and with it, his outlay of twenty thousand dollars. Well, I reasoned, at least he had been withdrawing his earnings regularly, right? Erm, right?!
Nope!
According to him, that would have made less sense than leaving the money there to continue rolling for him. So he'd lost everything in there, and when he tried asking for his ten thousand dollars back from his girlfriend to mitigate his losses (this really made me roll my eyes, by the way), she ghosted him.
With that in mind, my follow-up question was: if he hadn't been withdrawing the money from the site, where did he get the money to send to his girlfriend?
The answer made me facepalm really hard. He had taken the money from his own bank account. Because he had assumed that he would be able to withdraw the money from that site any time he wanted.
Wow. The sheer fucking recklessness of this made me see stars. How had that seemed like a good idea? Now he had not only lost the ten thousand he had sent, he had also lost the twenty thousand that was his initial investment. Thirty thousand in all - which, coincidentally, was about the sum I laid down as a deposit when I bought my own place back in 2014.
Evidence
Despite all that, my friend was adamant that what they had shared was real. That she had been real. And he would listen to nothing else.That was when something clicked inside me. I took the initial image he had shown me and did a Google image search for this. What I found made my blood run cold. The image turned up several similar images of the same woman. It led me to a Weibo blog. This blog belonged to an influencer from Zhejiang in China. As a matter of fact, the very image she had sent him, was a duplicate of the one found on the blog, with one small change: the Weibo icon had been snipped off.
 |
| Before and after. |
His girlfriend was a famous local celebrity in Zhejiang, who was already engaged to another man.
When I confronted my friend about this, he told me he wanted to drop the matter entirely, and asked me to stop talking about this to him. And, feeling that my point had been made, I saw no need to belabor it.
Lessons this taught me
Just because someone is older than me, does not make them smarter. Quite the contrary, they can be easier to fool precisely because they think they are immune to being taken for a ride. When considering if someone is capable of prudent decision-making, it helps to consider the context. My friend wasn't stupid normally, but in matters of romance, he has had woefully little experience. This clouded his judgment, and ultimately turned out to be his downfall.Do I feel guilty for my lack of action? No. Undeniably, I prioritized my own shit over that of my friend's, precisely because I trusted him to be able to handle his own shit. We've all got our crosses to bear.
But I do feel ashamed. As a tech professional, doing that Google image search should have been the first thing that came to me - not almost a month after the fact.
And I feel embarrassed. Some catfisher in China probably now thinks that Singaporean men are so goddamn easy to fool - using pictures of a local celebrity, no less! All she (or maybe even he) really needed to do was sweet-talk some idiot on WeChat for a few months, with a five-digit figure payoff to show for it. Now, if only earning honest money were that easy.
(cat)fishing in troubled waters!
T___T
T___T
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