The man who stole my $3,000 was named Tony, and twenty-five years later, he probably saved me from losing thousands more to a Facebook scammer in Nigeria.
At 26, I thought I understood deception. I’d been working in what we now call cybersecurity for several years, back when we just called it “computer security” and most people didn’t even own a computer.
I’d seen the early phishing attempts, the primitive social engineering calls, even those laughable Nigerian prince letters that arrived by actual postal mail. I considered myself pretty sharp.
Then I met Tony.
The Professional (1990s)
What a professional con artist taught me about how cons work became my best storytelling lesson.Share on X
I still despise that move more than the theft itself, because it turns the victim’s own conscience into the lock on the cell.
The approach wasn’t what you’d expect from organized crime. No intimidation, no threats, no movie-style drama. Instead, Tony presented himself as someone trying to help a mutual acquaintance out of a serious financial jam. The friend was facing bankruptcy, family troubles, the whole sob story. Tony had a solution, but he needed someone trustworthy to help make it happen. For more, see the caribbean connection and the freelancer’s scam playbook.
“I can double your investment in a week,” he told me over coffee at a downtown diner. “But more importantly, we can save this guy’s family from losing everything.”
Tony was maybe forty, average height, with the kind of forgettable face that probably helped him in his line of work. He wore a decent suit. Not expensive enough to draw attention, not cheap enough to suggest desperation. Everything about him screamed middle management. That was probably the point.
Notice the psychology here: Tony was selling me on being a hero, and the money was just the vehicle for doing the right thing. This was compassion with a financial upside.
Tony’s expertise showed here. He made me feel like a partner in something that existed in a legal gray area. Not exactly illegal, he suggested, but not something we’d want to discuss with the authorities either. Maybe some gambling debts were involved. Perhaps a few regulatory corners would be cut.
The genius of this approach hit me years later: once I felt complicit, I couldn’t report the scheme even if I wanted to. Who calls the police to say, “I think I’m being scammed while participating in something quasi-illegal”?
Tony had created a psychological prison. In my own head I’d gone from investor to co-conspirator. I still despise that move more than the theft itself, because it turns the victim’s own conscience into the lock on the cell. The shame and secrecy that came with that perceived complicity made me vulnerable in ways I didn’t understand at the time.
When it came time to hand over the money, Tony needed it immediately. That Saturday, not Monday. No delays, no time to think it over.
The Saturday deadline was masterful manipulation. I couldn’t sleep on the decision over the weekend. I couldn’t consult with friends or family. I couldn’t visit a regular bank with reasonable terms. I couldn’t take any time to think clearly about what I was doing.
Instead, I found myself at a payday loan office, borrowing $3,000 at predatory interest rates just to meet Tony’s artificial deadline. The irony wasn’t lost on me later. I was paying 400% annual interest to give money to a criminal.
Tony insisted on cash. No checks, no bank transfers, no electronic trails.
Just crisp bills in an envelope, handed over in a parking lot like some low-budget crime movie. But even the cash handoff felt professional. Tony provided receipts, official-looking paperwork, even what appeared to be legitimate business documentation. Everything looked like a real transaction between serious adults handling serious money.
The $3,000 I handed over represented weeks of work at that age.
Combined with the payday loan fees and interest, I was looking at thousands more in financial damage. It wasn’t money I could afford to lose, but Tony had positioned it as temporary. A short-term loan to help someone desperate, with guaranteed returns in seven days.
A week passed. No returns materialized. Instead, Tony called with an opportunity to double down.
“The first deal hit some snags,” he explained, “but I’ve got something even better. Same timeline, bigger returns.”
This is where my alarm bells finally started ringing, though I couldn’t articulate why at the time. Looking back, I realize Tony had made a fatal error: he shifted his psychological appeal from compassion to pure greed.
The original hook had been about helping someone in trouble. Now he was pushing bigger profits and better deals. The motivational inconsistency broke his spell. My brain started asking uncomfortable questions: if this was about helping someone, why was he suddenly focused on making me more money?
That shift in motivation saved me from losing even more. Tony’s mistake was abandoning the compassion angle that had worked so well initially.
The Digital Amateur (2020s)
Twenty-five years passed. Life had taught me new lessons about vulnerability. I was in my early 50s, recently widowed, and had found solace in an unexpected passion: belly dance photography. The art form was beautiful, the dancers were artists, and the camera gave me purpose during a difficult time.
That’s how I found myself driving 120 miles to San Luis Obispo for what promised to be an exceptional show. Electronic music, laser lights, and a talented dancer who moved like liquid mercury across the stage. She wore flowing silk that caught the colored lights, creating patterns that seemed to float independently of her body. I spent the evening capturing her performance and photographing the band, lost in the technical challenge of shooting in dramatic lighting.
After the show, she approached me with enthusiasm about the photos. Sweat still glistened on her forehead from the performance, and she had that post-show energy that performers get when they know they’ve nailed it.
We exchanged contact information like professionals do. Nothing romantic, just two people in the arts connecting over shared work. I drove the 120 miles home through the California night, thinking about camera settings and edit techniques.
The show I shot that night, December 3, 2010. The scam message arrived at 5 AM the next morning. Copyright © Richard Lowe.
At 5 AM the next morning, my phone buzzed with a Facebook message. It was from her, or so it appeared. The message was urgent, desperate: she was stranded in London, had missed her flight, and needed $1,500 wired immediately for a new ticket home.
Even at 5 AM, barely awake, my brain did the math instantly: San Luis Obispo to London in five hours? That’s some impressive travel time, even for someone with access to military jets.
The Tony lesson from decades earlier kicked in immediately. I knew this was a scam, but instead of just blocking and moving on, I decided to have some fun with it. For more, see the Facebook scam he helped me catch.
I responded with fake concern, asking for more details about her “situation.” The scammer, probably sitting in an internet cafe thousands of miles away, fed me the standard script: missed connections, lost luggage, embassy complications, urgent need for wire transfer.
After a few minutes of this dance, I decided to test my geographical instincts.
“How’s the weather in Nigeria?” I typed.
Short pause. I could almost hear the wheels turning on the other end. Then came a response that confirmed everything. The scammer tried to deflect while accidentally revealing his general geographic region.
We ended up having quite the conversation about scamming techniques.
Turned out to be a guy who had hacked her Facebook account and was systematically working through her contact list, looking for vulnerable targets. He probably figured a photographer who had just met her would be the perfect mark. Someone with a professional connection but not personal enough to verify the story through other channels.
I reported the hack to Facebook, called the real dancer to warn her about the compromised account, and went back to bed. The whole interaction had taken maybe twenty minutes of my morning.
I never saw her again. Not because of any awkwardness over the scam. She was grateful I had caught it and warned her. But that’s how these things sometimes go. Professional connections don’t always turn into lasting friendships, and belly dance photography eventually led me down other creative paths.
She really was a talented performer and a nice person. The scammer had picked the wrong target, but he had also violated something pure about artistic collaboration and professional networking.
My take
Tony cost me $3,000, and I’d call it the cheapest lesson I ever bought. Years later a hacked Facebook account asked me at 5 AM to wire money for a flight home from London, and the travel time made no sense. I knew in seconds. Check the clock and the map before you feel anything. Then warn the person whose account got hijacked, because the scammer is working through their whole contact list.
What Does Getting Scammed Teach About Stories?
That $3,000 in direct losses from Tony, plus payday loan interest and fees, might have been the best cybersecurity investment I ever made. It taught me to recognize professional-level social engineering and gave me a baseline for measuring every suspicious approach that followed. The Facebook hack attempt was amateur hour compared to Tony’s expert manipulation.
Both encounters show something I see in every ghostwriting project. The most powerful chapters in business books and memoirs come from moments of vulnerability, failure, and embarrassment, and I’ll take one of those over a dozen victory laps.
When I work with clients on their books, the stories they hesitate to tell are almost always the ones that carry the most weight.
The CEO who got conned by a vendor and changed how the company handles procurement. The entrepreneur who trusted the wrong partner and rebuilt from the wreckage. The executive who made a decision that cost real money and real relationships before learning the lesson that shaped the rest of their career.
Tony worked because the story has specific details that can’t be faked. The payday loan office. The parking lot handoff. The shift from compassion to greed that broke the spell. The Facebook scam works because the geography is absurd (San Luis Obispo to London in five hours) and because the contrast with Tony’s sophistication reveals how both criminal methodology and personal wisdom evolve over time.
Every potential author has stories like these. Tell them, including the parts that are embarrassing, and trust that the lesson is worth more than the pride it costs to share it.
I’m still angry at Tony after twenty-five years, and grateful to him in the same breath. People who run cons like his deserve every bit of contempt they get. The people they fool have nothing to be ashamed of, and I’d put a story like that in a book ahead of any success story a client could hand me.
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Scams hit families as hard as freelancers. Family Cybersecurity is my book on protecting the people who live in your house, starting with a ransomware call in the middle of the night.
