Truth is stranger than fiction. Strangest thing to come out of my conversation with Christine Debbie is truth emerging from our fiction. I could have never predicted the turn of events on the closing day of scammer scramble. Money for nothing, get your chicks for free!
For those in the audience who are new to scammers, this is the point most Messenger cons request money via gift cards. Typically, they want you to buy a certain amount of cards, reply back with the unique digits on the card’s back, and then mail them to an address. The mailing address is some legitimate mailbox in the United States, which can easily be located on Google maps. However, the scammer only cares about the digits, they are not at the mailing address — or even in the country — most scammers reside in Russian, Asian, or African. I am guessing my scammer is West African based on the contact times and funky English… Possibly Nigerian. The home of the old joke about naive Americans sending money to the deposed king of Nigeria.
She wanted a check. I nearly requested her assistance on how to write a check. What is this, grandma in the grocery line?!?
All things to this point have been a riot of laughter and jokes, but Christine’s next move floored me. She sent me a real residential address… with an actual person’s name to write the check out to.
To keep the scammer communicating while I did my own research, I asked mundane details about the lady at the address: disposition, age, and scale of hotness.
Christine Debbie has no clue what she is doing… Why would she lie about the Iowa lady’s age? I found the lady on Facebook, and she is a freaking real person! The name is so unique that my Facebook search produced a single person with that name; and she lives in Muscatine, Iowa — the exact town Christine Debbie asked me to mail the money. Cue the FBI!
(The actual lady’s Facebook profile photo who lives in the Iowa apartment.)
Holy catfish crawling out of the river and taking a selfies, Batman! I am on the case Commissioner Gordon… A quick call to Muscatine’s US Post Office confirmed the address is an apartment. The county sheriff told me to pound sand, “No victim sir, no crime.” (Click). The county clerk gave me the property owner’s name. The owner of the property confirmed the lady in the Facebook photo currently resides in apartment. I asked the owner, “Is she a dope head?” Which he laughed, “I know xxxxxxx, and she is a nice lady.” He briefly paused, and when he returned to his thought I could hear concern in his voice. After agreeing to reconnect in a few days, he asked his staff to contact the police to conduct a welfare check on the apartment.
My eyes raced over the week long threads to see if there were any red flags about this routine scam. All the right things were there: bad grammar, pretending to be a caring person, no concept of US culture or geography, playing on sensitivities, and then going for the money. But why would they have me send money to a middle aged divorcee who lives in a small Iowa town?
Her Facebook friends!
Of the 57 Facebook friends, she is connected with fifteen male Nigerian twenty-somethings. Most of them reside in the city of Ado-Ekiti. Annually there are hundreds, if not thousands, of scams originating from this Nigerian city. Looks like Ms. Lonely Muscatine is running a hustle for the deposed king of Nigeria, and accepting personal checks to her one-bedroom Iowa palace.
As of the publishing deadline for this final entry, I am still waiting for the property owner to call back with the results of the welfare visit. The sheriff’s office is still hanging up on me. (Click). I even attempted to contact a person in her Facebook friends list who also lives in Muscatine — but nothing yet.
Shortly after my calls to the bureaucrats in Iowa, I gave Christine the bad news regarding the money.
Achieving ODJ 