AUSTRALIAN WOMAN, 64, SCAMMED OUT OF $100,000 BY MAN SHE MET ON FACEBOOK.

PATRICIA MEISTER (64).

A 64-year-old woman has opened up about how she was swindled out of $100,000 after falling for a man she'd never met.

Patricia Meister, from Queensland, struck up an online relationship with who she though was a dashing middle-aged businessman after he sent her a friend request on Facebook in 2015.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, the woman revealed the moment she fell head over heels in love, before discovering her Italian lover named 'Carlos' was a Nigerian fraudster.

Ms Meister said the man seemed keen to share every aspect of his life with her when he messaged her every single day.

'I'd never been on dating websites, and I only used Facebook for business. So when I got the friend request, I thought it couldn't do any harm, can it?,' she said.

'I guess at the time, I was going through a period in my life where I felt isolated. I'd been single for a while and I'd never been on dating sites.'

'We started chatting. He was charming, smart and educated. He was very good with English and he was very romantic.

I was very much in love with him at one stage.'

She said the man who claimed he was based in Brisbane had told her he was working in interior design and his heritage was Italian and Scottish.

The pair exchanged messages on a daily basis before he started calling her to have phone conversations.

'When I first spoke to him, I heard his voice but he had a different accent to what I'd expected. I remember thinking "what is that accent?" I couldn't place his accent.

'I wasn't familiar with his accent at the time, but thinking about it now, he was definitely African... He was Nigerian.'

Despite casting some doubts on him, Ms Meister continued speaking to him as the weeks passed.

Within eight weeks into their relationship, 'Carlos' asked her if she could lend him $600 because his credit card wouldn't work when he was in Malaysia for a project.

'It didn't feel right but I thought "well, it's not a huge amount of money to lose". It wasn't a huge request so I did a wire transfer to him,' she recalled.

'A part of me thought it was wrong so I questioned him, saying "you're a businessman, your credit card should work..." His story didn't add up.'

But his request for money didn't end there. He would make up a different excuse each time he asked her for money.

'Carlos' was planning a trip home to Brisbane when his goods were held up in Malaysian customs. And so he needed a payment to retrieve them.

'The first amount I sent him was $7,000. When he went to get the money, he told me he needed another $7,000,' she recalled.

'Everything he said was backed up by "documents" - and there was always a lawyer in the background when we spoke over the phone.

'When he tried to pay me back, he said his bank couldn't do the large international transfer so he arranged for a courier to deliver the cash instead.'

Ms Meister said she was given a link to a website with a 'tracking sheet', in which she kept a close eye on the parcel's movement.

But when the parcel reached Kuala Lumpur airport, there was a $25,000 fee to let the cash leave the country.

'Carlos had listed my business address on the documents so I was worried. I thought, "God, there's a brief case full of money with my name on it",' she said.

'By that time, I thought it might look suspicious if I let my money in my name sit there, I was kind of thinking "well I've got to pay this money to get my money back".

She made the big payment but when the parcel got to Melbourne airport, she was hit with another fee.

'I pretty much paid it. Money was getting hard to find. He pretty much picked up the last amount of my money,' she said.

On the day she was scheduled to supposedly get the parcel with the money she'd been promised, she received a phone call.

'I got a phone call from someone saying Carlos and his lawyer had been in a serious car accident so they needed money for medical expenses,'

she recalled.

'My stomach dropped to my shoes. I knew at that point, I'd been scammed.'

She didn't pay for their medical fees - and the pair stopped talking for about a week.

'He then tried to request more money to cover his medical fees but at that point, I had gone through my last dollar,'

she said.

'I couldn't pay him anymore and I even told him I wasn't going to send him any more money. Shortly after that, he made a "miraculous recovery" but I'd stopped talking to him by then.'

Ms Meister even tried to report the incident to police but there was nothing they could do after she was conned out of $100,000 in total.

And two months later, she received a text message from Carlos, saying: 'This is all a terrible misunderstanding.'

Without a second thought, Ms Meister fired back: 'You're a scammer'.

'After I accused him of being a scammer, he ended our conversation with: "Catch me if you can, my dear",' she recalled.

Ms Meister said she eventually found a support group called Romance Scams Now where women share similar tales of their ordeals.

'I used to hear about the TV stars who were scammed and remembered thinking "how can you send money to someone like that?",' she recalled.

'I think I was sort of aware but I had no idea these things could be so complex or how well developed they are. It's a worldwide business, it's very difficult to catch them because they're sitting behind a computer.

'People think you're stupid but they're not walking in our shoes. It's not a matter of being stupid. Even the most intelligent, educated women are getting scammed.

'I know I'll never get my money back but all you can do is raise awareness. There's a lot of lonely people out there, the dating websites are riddled with scammers.'

SOURCE:

dailymail.co.uk

Comments

CUBA CLAIMS CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER IS FIDEL CASTRO'S SON.

The suicide note left by Fidel Castro’s eldest son has rocked the Cuban nation this week, with the most astonishing revelation being the claim that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was his half-brother and the son of the late Fidel Castro. The handwritten note left by Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, 68, the eldest of Fidel Castro’s children, appears to confirm the longstanding rumor in Cuba that Fidel Castro fathered Justin Trudeau after a public tryst with Margaret Trudeau in 1970. “ Castro Diaz-Balart, who had been attended by a group of doctors for several months due to a state of profound depression, committed suicide this morning ,” Cubadebate website reported. The death of the high-profile government nuclear scientist, also known as “Fidelito”, or Little Fidel, because of how much he looked like his father, stunned the nation, however it is his “ explosive ” suicide note that has set tongues wagging in Havana. Amid a wide-ranging barrage of compl...

WHY CHINA'S DOG-MEAT MARKET HAS EXPANDED.

Every year during the summer solstice, a dog-eating festival takes place in Yulin, a city in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi. This year’s event ended with the usual controversy. Photographs of dogs being fried or treated cruelly went viral. The Jinhua Hutou Dog Meat Festival, as it is called, was abruptly canceled last week. Animal-rights activists and American congressmen demanded that China ban the eating of dogs and cats, as Taiwan did in April. Yulin’s local government took modest steps to restrain or hide some of the more contentious activities, such as selling dogs in food markets. Still, the festival was packed. Why has the controversial culinary habit become so popular in China? Contrary to cliché, dog meat has not always been a common item in the Chinese diet. Unlike in the West, eating dogs has never been taboo, but it appears to have been rare in the past. Government accounts single out butchers who sold dog meat, suggesting it ...

UGANDA ANNOUNCES "KILL THE GAYS" LAW IMPOSING DEATH PENALTY TO HOMOSEXUALS.

Kampala, UGANDA: Uganda has announced plans to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. The bill, colloquially known as “Kill the Gays” in Uganda, was nullified five years ago on a technicality, but the government said on Thursday it plans to resurrect it within weeks. The government said the legislation would curb a rise in “unnatural sex” in the east African nation. “Homosexuality is not natural to Ugandans, but there has been a massive recruitment by gay people in schools, and especially among the youth, where they are promoting the falsehood that people are born like that,” the country’s ethics and integrity minister, Simon Lokodo, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Our current penal law is limited. It only criminalises the act. We want it made clear that anyone who is even involved in promotion and recruitment has to be criminalised. Those that do grave acts will be given the death sentence.” Mr Lokodo said the bill, which has the support of th...

MALARIA VACCINE PROVES HIGHLY EFFECTIVE IN BURKINA FASO.

A vaccine against malaria has been shown to be highly effective in trials in Africa, holding out the real possibility of slashing the death toll of a disease that kills 400,000 mostly small children every year. The vaccine, developed by scientists at the Jenner Institute of Oxford University, showed up to 77% efficacy in a trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso over 12 months. The hunt for a malaria vaccine has been going on the best part of a century. One, the Mosquirix vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline, has been through lengthy clinical trials but is only partially effective, preventing 39% of malaria cases and 29% of severe malaria cases among small children in Africa over four years. It is being piloted by the World Health Organization in parts of Kenya, Ghana and Malawi. The Oxford vaccine is the first to meet the WHO goal of 75% efficacy against the mosquito-borne parasite disease. Larger trials are now beginning, involving 4,800 children in four countries. Prof ...

MINERS IN NAMIBIA DISCOVER SHIPWRECK LOADED $13 MILLION WORTH OF GOLD.

Image: Dieter Noli. Diamond miners working off the coast of Africa were beyond surprised when they discovered a 500-year-old shipwreck teeming with gold worth $13 million and other treasures. The ship, aptly named ‘Bom Jesus’ or ‘Good Jesus,’ was like a miracle to the miners. Bom Jesus was first identified and discovered by geologists working for the mining company De Beers in 2008. It was found off the coast of Namibia near Oranjemund. Image: Dieter Noli. According to experts, Bom Jesus is from the Golden era of Portuguese explorers who set sail in all directions in search of new lands to colonize. The ship left Lisbon in 1533 under the supervision of Sir Francisco de Noronha. But on its way to India, it mysteriously vanished. Before the discovery, the miners were draining an artificial salt lake. As the lake dried out, many lost ships were found at the bottom of the lake. Bom Jesus was among them, and it is considered the oldest of all ...

POPE TOLD BY ARMY CHIEF: "THERE IS NO RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION IN MYANMAR."

Myanmar’s powerful army chief has told Pope Francis there is “no religious discrimination” in the country during talks at the start of the pontiff’s delicate visit to the majority-Buddhist nation that has been accused of “ethnic cleansing” against its Muslim Rohingya people. Min Aung Hlaing. Reuters Thousands of Catholics welcomed Pope Francis to the country’s capital, Naypyidaw, where he arrived for a three-day visit to Myanmar on Monday. The trip – fraught with sensitivity and trepidation over how he will deal with the plight of the Muslim Rohingya – could be the trickiest yet of his papacy. The army chief told the pope that “Myanmar has no religious discrimination at all. Likewise our military too ... performs for the peace and stability of the country,” according to a Facebook post published by the general’s office a few hours after the meeting. There is also “no discrimination between ethnic groups in Myanmar”, he added. The Vatican said the m...

BOTSWANA SHUTDOWNS PROPHET BUSHIRI CHURCHES.

Gaborone, BOTSWANA: It never rains, but it pours for flamboyant prophet Shepherd Bushiri’s Enlightened Christian Gathering church in Botswana, as government closes down all of his church branches following the deregistration of the organisation last year. As a result, disciples of Bushiri’s in Botswana have resorted to following their leader through his television channel, while those who have the means are travelling to South Africa on weekends to attend Sunday services. The recent crackdown on the church comes just a few weeks after the government of Botswana lifted a visa travelling ban imposed on Bushiri during former president Ian Khama’s presidency. Unlike other Malawian citizens, Bushiri, who is also known as Major 1, was forced to apply for a visa each time he entered Botswana in 2017. The then nationality, immigration and gender affairs minister Edwin Batshu told MPs that Bushiri was “too demanding”. Batshu indicated that the government slapped Bushiri wi...

EGYPTIAN VILLAGE WHERE MOSQUE WAS BOMBED HAD BEEN WARNED.

CAIRO (AP) : Elders of a village in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula where militants killed 305 people in a mosque had been warned by Islamic State operatives to stop collaborating with security forces and to suspend rituals associated with Islam’s mystical Sufi movement, security officials and residents said. The latest warning came as recently as a week ago, telling villagers in Al-Rawdah not to hold Sufi rituals on Nov. 29-30 to commemorate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, according to residents and the officials who work for security and military intelligence agencies operating in Sinai. Local operatives of the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Sinai consider Sufis to be heretics who should be killed. Ahmed Saqr, an expert on the Sinai insurgency, said militants had publicly identified the mosque, which also serves as a Sufi center, as a target months ago. He wrote on Saturday in a Facebook post that the selection of the Al-Rawdah mosque as a target “raises questions about tho...

THOUSANDS OF FAKE COVID-19 VACCINES HAVE BEEN SEIZED IN SOUTH AFRICA & CHINA.

File photo - Interpol Secretary-General Jurgen Stock Image: africanews. Lyon, FRANCE: Police have seized thousands of counterfeit coronavirus vaccines in South Africa and China and have made more than 80 arrests after a criminal network selling fake jabs was uncovered, Interpol said on Wednesday. In South Africa, police officers found 400 ampoules of fake vaccines, equivalent to around 2,400 doses, at a warehouse just outside Johannesburg. A large quantity of fake 3M masks was also found and police arrested three Chinese nationals and a Zambian national. Police in South Africa seized hundreds of fake COVID-19 vaccines and made several arrests following a global alert issued by INTERPOL. In China, police successfully identified a network selling counterfeit COVID-19 vaccines, raided the manufacturing premises, resulting in the arrest of some 80 suspects, and seized more than 3,000 fake vaccines on the scene. The investigation was supported and coordinated by Interpol’s Illicit Goods ...

A MODEL SOLD HER VIRGINITY FOR $3 MILLION TO THE ARABIAN BILLIONAIRE.

A model claims she has auctioned her virginity for nearly $3million (£2.2million) - and says it is a 'dream come true' for her. Giselle, 19, who is based in the US, says she decided to sell her virginity through the notorious German-based website Cinderella Escorts. The agency claims the highest bidder was a businessman from Abu Dhabi, with a bid of 2.5m Euros ($2.9m/£2.2m), while a Hollywood actor was said to have made the second highest bid of 2.4m Euros ($2.8m/£2.1m). Giselle says she will use the money to pay for her college fees, buy a new house, and go traveling around the world. Watch the Video below: The model said: 'I am happy to have decided to sell my virginity through Cinderella Escorts. 'I would never have dreamt that the bid would rise so high and we would have reached 2.5million Euros. This is a dream come true.' Giselle said she was 'shocked' by the outrage against women selling her virginity, describing it as...

Kioo17 Journal

Search This Blog