Internet Time Machine
I Was the Face of an Online Romance Scammer
How I fell into what may or may not have been a meta-scam
This story is part of the Internet Time Machine, a collection about life online in the 2010s.
If it hasn’t happened already, it’s likely that each of us will be the mark of an attempted online scam of one kind or another. You may imagine some shadowy cabal of Nigerian gangsters targeting naïve senior citizens unschooled in internet security or anonymous-style hackers trolling for credit card information, and you probably wouldn’t be too far off.
But what does it mean when the face on the other end of the scam looks a bit more familiar? What if it’s your own?
That’s a question I was confronted with when I was contacted out of the blue by a recently divorced German woman on Facebook claiming to have been involved in a months-long burgeoning romance with a man she had never met. That man was me—sort of. Her broken English only served to heighten the sense of disconnect from reality as she explained the details of her affair:
“normally it is not my way to contact an absolut strange man at facebook, but it might be, that this i want you to tell is a little bit interresting for you. first sorry, because of my bad…
