Table of Contents
A name I had not seen in thirteen years showed up in my Facebook messages this month. An old friend from my belly dance photography days. By the time she got to “today is the first day I have no money at all for food,” I already knew how the whole thing ended.
I have been scammed before. I wrote about it.
There was the $3,000 I handed a con man named Tony across a diner table in the 1990s, money I borrowed at payday-loan interest to do it. There was the hacked account that tried to wire $1,250 out of me at five in the morning.
Both cost me something. Tony cost me cash and pride. The early-morning one cost me twenty minutes and a phone call to warn the real woman her account was compromised.
What they bought me was worth more than they took. They taught me to read the sc more scams I have caughtript before the curtain goes up. I eventually mapped the whole freelancer scam playbook from what these cons had in common.
This time the curtain went up on message one.
The Reconnection That Was Not One
Cold December night in Florida. I was going through old albums and found pictures of her from the shows I used to shoot. Good memories. So I sent a friendly note. Cold here. Found your photos. We should talk.
Call her Dana.
Her reply ignored every word of it. No “which photos.” No “God, remember that show in the desert.” Nothing about the thirteen years or the dancing or one single thing we ever actually shared.
She went straight to the floor. Not doing well. Ashamed. Embarrassed. Had not told a soul. Then the line that does the heavy lifting: “You were the one person I knew I could go to.”
A real person answers what you said. A script ignores you and reads its next line. Dana was not talking to me. She was reading off a page, and the page did not care what I wrote.
Six Disasters in One Paragraph
The story landed the next day, all of it at once.
Long story short, I spent the last 18 months in an abusive relationship with a covert narcissist. It gradually became more and more violent and ended with me in the trauma center in the ER. I had used the money he paid me for my half of the house when we divorced to pay one year of rent upfront. I had to put his name on the lease, because anyone 18 and over has to be on the lease nowadays. So in essence I trapped myself. I couldn’t get him off the lease, and because I had put my money into the rental I had nowhere to go and no way out. I had a friend living with us too. I had cosigned an apartment for her and she ended up losing it, so she came to stay with me. Neither of them ever paid rent or bills. I ended up supporting 2 grown adults full time. As it got worse I had to stop working, because my neurological disorders got even worse and my memory started being affected. I’m cutting a lot of stuff out here, but a few weeks ago I was choked to passing out twice and beaten. My friend had moved out while I was at work a month before, leaving me to fix up her room and clean everything. I’m lucky my landlord let me stay a few weeks past lease end so I could get some things into storage, but I basically lost everything and was financially wiped out. A couple months ago I cashed out my teacher retirement, and once it arrives I’ll be OK. But it takes up to 90 days, and they refuse to go out of the order it was requested in regardless of my circumstances. I’m currently without a place to stay, and today is the first day I have no money at all for food. I have a small support system of 2 people, but there’s only so much they can do. I’m beyond embarrassed to ask for help, which is why it’s taken me so long to reach out to anyone. Could you help me? I understand if not. Please don’t feel obligated in any way. If you can, I’m able to pay you back once my retirement arrives, by June 14 latest. I’m happy to show you the paperwork.
Read it as the literal truth and it is a disaster movie. Any one of those events flattens a normal person for a year. All six at once, stacked on one woman, with a tidy payout waiting just over the hill, is a screenplay.
That is the problem. The same structure that makes the story heartbreaking if it is true is what makes it stink if it is not. Real lives break in one or two directions at a time. They do not collapse on every axis at once and then resolve themselves in ninety business days.
Why I Knew
The thirteen years of silence were not a hole in the con. They were the engine. A dead friendship is a trust account somebody else already funded.
No recent contact to contradict the story, no recent contact to make the sudden warmth feel off. Tony had to build my trust over weeks of coffee. Dana arrived with thirteen years of it pre-installed, and not one ounce of it required the person typing to actually be Dana.
The shame and the secrecy were doing Tony’s old job from the other direction. Tony made me feel like a co-conspirator so I could not report him without turning myself in.
Dana’s “I’m so ashamed, I haven’t told anyone, you’re the only one I can go to” builds the same cell from the inside. It cuts the target off from anyone who might say “that sounds like a scam.” Do not check. Do not ask around. Just send.
The money that is real but locked up is straight out of the cons that already came for me. The Caribbean scammer who almost got me had a consultant who had to be paid out of an overpayment. Dana has a pension trapped behind a ninety-day window.
Same machine, fresh coat of paint. There is always a reason real money has to leave your account tonight, against money supposedly flying toward you next month.
The small stuff piled up too. “Please don’t feel obligated in any way” is reverse psychology, built to make yes feel like my own bright idea. “My memory started being affected” is a get-out-of-jail card she can play later when she fumbles a detail I test her on.
And the whole thing came wrapped in clean therapy vocabulary, covert narcissist and all, with not one sentence where she owned a single choice she made. Everything happened to her. Nobody learns fluent victim-speak while starving in a parking lot.
People kept telling me she had full access to her real account, like that settled it. See my interview with Erin Riley for a working author’s take. It settles the opposite. A real account in a thief’s hands looks exactly like the real person from my side of the glass.
Same photos, same friends, same history. That is why account takeovers work at all. “She knew things only she would know” proves nothing when the account is the thing that knows them.
The Part That Actually Matters
Here is where I stopped caring whether it was real.
Run the branches. Say I send money and it really is Dana. The money is gone, which is fine, because I never lend to friends or family. If I give, I give, and I write it off the second it leaves my hand.
The gone money is not the problem. The problem is the second ask. And the third. Six simultaneous catastrophes do not get solved by a grocery run. The next emergency is already in the script, waiting for me to prove I will pay.
Say I offer her a place to stay instead. That is a meteor in a pond I made calm on purpose. Chaos does not wait politely on the porch once you let the person through the door.
Either road, I am an enabler. Every dollar and every plane ticket strips away the one thing that might save her, the pressure to deal with her own choices.
Look at the story she told. She put the abuser on the lease. She cosigned for the freeloader. She bankrolled two grown adults who paid nothing.
True or invented, the shape is identical. Things happen to her, other people are the villains, and there is never a moment where she says “this part was on me.” You cannot want somebody’s recovery more than they do. Being the last enabler in the chain just pushes back the day the bill finally comes due. For more, see more scams I have caught.
Enabling wrecks both people, not just the one in trouble. The person getting rescued never feels the cost of their own choices, so the choices never change. Consequences are the only teacher that works, and the enabler keeps wiping the lesson off the board before it can sink in.
The enabler loses too. Money, time, and peace pour into a hole that never fills. They call it kindness. Most of the time they are buying relief from the discomfort of watching someone flail.
The time to stop is before you start. The first no is cheap. Every no after that costs more, because the deeper in you are, the more walking away feels like quitting on something you already paid for.
That is the sunk cost fallacy, working exactly as designed. You gave $500, so leaving now feels like torching the $500, so you hand over another $500. Then the gambler’s fallacy whispers that the next check is the one that finally turns it all around. The appeal to pity reloads with every fresh crisis, and the meter never stops running.
The math only gets worse the longer you wait. The cheapest exit is the one you take before the first dollar ever leaves your hand.
So it does not matter who was typing. Stranger three thousand miles away, the answer is obviously no. The real Dana in real trouble, the answer is still no, because I spent years building a life with no six-alarm fire living in the spare room.
Scotty said it best. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I have danced this dance. I know the steps cold.
I am not ignoring her out of cruelty. I am refusing to stand between a person and the only thing that might fix her. I read the message, clocked every beat, and let it sit there unanswered.
What This Has to Do With Writing Books
I tell scam stories like this one for the same reason I hunt for them when I ghostwrite. The strongest chapters in any memoir or business book are never the wins.
They are the moments somebody got played, made the wrong call, handed three grand to a man in a good suit. The CEO who got conned by a vendor and rebuilt the company’s controls because of it. The founder who trusted the wrong partner and learned to read people the expensive way. Me, at twenty-six, counting cash into an envelope in a parking lot.
The stories people are scared to tell are almost always the ones that carry the weight. Tony cost me three thousand dollars and taught me to spot a con on the first message. Dana cost me nothing, because I already paid the tuition decades ago.
That is the only kind of tuition worth anything. The expensive kind you only have to pay once.
Schedule a free consultation to discuss your book project.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related: more scams I have caught