Renee Hollander, a 56-year-old married woman, drove two hours from her hometown to Philadelphia International Airport without her husband Mark Hollander’s knowledge, just to meet her Facebook lover.
A year earlier, Renee had met Sergeant Michael Chris, a 28-year-old U.S. Army soldier in Iraq, who claimed to be on Facebook.
Chris told Renee that he had just defused a terrorist bomb and was sharing some military anecdotes.
“He kept saying to me, ‘You’re so funny, you let me know there’s someone waiting for me at home who I can talk to anytime.'”
“I can make someone feel warm, and being needed by them makes me happy,” Renee praised her Facebook lover.
After months of being together day and night, Renee unleashed her motherly nature on Chris, who began to call her “my wife.
In this long-distance relationship, Chris soothed Renee with his words, while Renee expressed her love in the form of financial support for soldiers stationed abroad.
Renee wired money so Chris could buy beer to celebrate his birthday.
Paying for itunes recharge cards on Chris’ behalf so he could buy more time with his phone.
Even paid for medication for one of his daughters, Annabelle, in California.
Just a month ago, Renee advanced Chris another $5,000 for a flight from Iraqi Africa to Philadelphia, which Chris promised to pay her back as soon as we met.
It was stolen from her husband’s cash stashed in his bedroom and part of their couple’s savings.
Yet when Renee waited for hours at the airport in agony, she learned from airport personnel that the flight did not exist.
She finally realized that her pink romance was an outright scam.
Renee bought sleeping pills and vodka, then looked at Chris’s picture and drank them all down.
What Renee didn’t know was that the man in the photo was neither named Chris nor did he even know her.
The man’s real identity is Sergeant Daniel of the Marine Corps, and the photos he posted on Facebook have been used by scammers to register thousands of fake accounts with military identities.
In this Facebook love scam, Renee and Daniel represent two sides of the victims.
American soldiers have unwittingly become puppets for online scammers who use dreamy images of American GIs to lure in Western women looking for love.
Unlike the short and sweet tea-seller scam, Facebook love scams typically lure innocent women for long periods of time, while also taking a toll on the soldiers whose identities have been stolen.
In 2010, Sgt. Daniel’s Facebook received hundreds of private messages from unknown women.
They questioned why, after months of romance, he stopped responding to any messages and begged Daniel not to leave them.
“Now I’m breaking up with someone every week who thinks I was not only emotionally committed, but financially as well, and it’s just overwhelming.”
In one of the most outrageous instances, Daniel even found out that a friend’s mother thought she was in a relationship with herself.
“Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Plenty of Fish . . Tinder and Loving Singles, you can see my picture anywhere.”
Although these fake accounts all have the same face, they have completely different experiences.
“Sergeant, Colonel, Major, Lieutenant Colonel… I’ve been to West Point, VMI, the University of Louisiana, the University of Texas… I’ve led humanitarian aid missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria.”
Even though Daniel reported the imposter fraud accounts every day, more always popped up the next day.
He reported the problem to his platoon commander, as well as to his battalion’s intelligence officer, but everyone said there was nothing they could do. “I thought military intelligence would enter a few ‘0s’ and ‘1s’ and everything would go away, but it wasn’t that simple.”
Daniel’s experience reflects the nature of impersonating a military emotional scam, and there is simply no one who can stop it all.
There is no social media that rigorously verifies the true identity of users, which gives criminals an opportunity to take advantage of it.
Whether it’s facebook, instagram, or Twitter, all it takes is a cell phone number to be anyone in a social network.
Enter the partial name of a random U.S. Army general in facebook and more than N accounts with the same avatar are sure to appear, a situation that is also true today.
Every year, thousands of people are confused by the romantic scams of social networks. It is not about the innocence of the victims, it is about the cunning of the scammers.
So much so that the U.S. Army’s official website has a portal for people to report fraudulent accounts.
According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the number of emotional scams is much higher than before because of the new crown epidemic that kept people home all day last year.
In 2020 alone, online emotional scams cost the U.S. Ran a whopping $304 million, a 305 percent increase over a four-year period.
And that number may just be the tip of the iceberg, as many victims are too shy to report this type of scam, even though the crime is becoming more and more common.
But then again, with a telecom scam of this magnitude, why do these scammers stay at large and where are they hiding?
All evidence points to Nigeria, where their money was eventually lost, according to wire transfer information from Renee and other victims.
Once upon a time the Nigerian Prince scam was all over the European and American postal systems, now Nigerian business people have long turned to the internet.
The scammers call themselves yahoo boys and call their victims customers, this is from the early years when business was mostly conducted on yahoo messenger.
They do not need to know the United States, they can know everything they need in google.
The cost of the business is just a few hundred naira per day in a cyber cafe.
Or a few thousand naira at a time, to find a European and American countries to circulate here seven hand laptops, a few brothers in partnership is the studio.
Since the official language of Nigeria is also English, they do not have a language barrier in carrying out fraudulent business.
Even novices who do not know how to chat, can also rely on the previous summary of the chat guide, in a short period of time to capture the hearts of young white women thousands of kilometers away.
“I pledge my love to you with my life, and I would give all my time and energy in the beautiful relationship we have together.”
“Every day I am getting to know you better and I am always imagining how feminine you are in all your glory. As long as we are together in the future, I will have the happiest life.”
No one can survive this onslaught of sweet talk.
Three 25-year-old Nigerian men, who wished to remain anonymous, told The New York Times that they tricked people on Facebook to earn money for their education at Lagos State University.
used to make $28 to $42 a month from ironing shirts, and has made $14,000 in two years since spying a love scam business, and another estimated he made $28,000 in three years.
“There are a lot of people who would feel lonely right now, maybe newly divorced, or unhappy in their families.”
“Everyone wants to be loved and listened to by others, and we know what to say. In some ways, clients are paying for emotions.”
Akinola Bolaji, a 35-year-old Nigerian, said in an interview with The New York Times.
He used to be a yahoo, and locals colloquially call them romance hustlers.
“We also have a conscience, but poverty does not pain the conscience.”
He’s been doing online scams since he was 15, including posing on Facebook as an American fisherman named Robert.
Aquinola Bolaji told The New York Times that finding victims is a numbers game.
“You would send messages to thousands of women and only a handful would respond.”
“If five people respond, then three of those people may not have the money, another one may not cough up the money, but there will always be one who will pay me.”
But in an emotional scam, it’s not just the monetary investment that costs the scammer; the hidden cost is also the emotional two-way internal conflict.
Today, Bolaji claims he is no longer in the emotional scam business because he fell in love with a woman in Georgia, USA, on the job.
“Love scams are not wise because, in addition to money, they also touch the heart.”
But in any case, emotional fraud is ultimately an unforgivable crime that brings trouble to the impersonated soldier, and even more so to the victimized woman, causing monetary and emotional damage, and can even damage a family and even a human life.
As mentioned before, Ms. Renee, after swallowing sleeping pills, she was taken to the hospital by a good Samaritan.
She was lucky to recover her life, but her cheating behavior was also known by her husband.
In the year or so that followed, her husband Mark repeatedly domesticated Renee.
On Christmas Eve 2018, Mark shot and killed Renee and her 85-year-old father-in-law in their new home before killing himself.
After an investigation, the St. Lucie County Sheriff said Mr. Mark left no sign of motive.
This is utterly tragic.
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