Intelligence and IQ are no guarantee of, well, intelligence…
Lovelorn John Rousakis fell head over heels for a stunning brunette online… only to be fleeced for £160,000.
He met so-called Canadian nurse “Esther Anderson” on a dating site and they enjoyed daily chats for 12 months.
But the picture he was sent of “Esther” is a fake.
And her cries for help and wild tales of being jailed for smuggling gold were total claptrap.
Each time Esther asked for help, intelligent John transferred money from his account – even believing he would become the owner of two 12.03kg gold bars worth £1.15million.
John, 43, took out loans to give Esther £80,064.72, plus a further £80,000 borrowed from his father.
He was sent receipts for the gold. But it was entirely fictional.
Of course they were and an intelligent man would have done a reverse search on the images, would have sussed the language used and would have spotted the obvious scammer trick of never actually meeting face to face. If you haven’t done that in a year, something is very wrong. But by that time, there would have been other red flags. The biggest one is someone you have never met asking for money.
John – who has an IQ of over 135 and a masters degree in engineering and robotics – fell for the crooks’ story after meeting Esther on dating website match.com.
Which just goes to show that academic achievement and intelligence are not the same thing. A high IQ does not equate to common sense. The whole story was an obvious fake from start to finish and if he was that intelligent he would have spotted it very early on. These scammers aren’t particularly clever or sophisticated, they merely rely on the gullibility of their victims.
Hang on.
He was sent a picture of this woman, which turned out to be fake.
But he was talking on Facetime?
Doesn’t Facetime have the video call option? (I’m pretty sure it does, but i’m not an Appleist, so can’t be 100% certain)
How come he never used that?
Or Whatsapp, or viber, or Zoom, or any of the other many video calling apps.
You’ve been talking for a year and never done a live video chat?
Did he never ask for nudes? (lol)
I mean, if someone asked me for money and I’d never met them, or even had a live facetime with them, then “no” would be the answer.
“But I’m stuck in a Ghanian prison.”
“Oh well. Good luck with that.”
And did he lie to his father about what the money was for? Or did his dad just get £80K to send abroad as well.
So much fail.
I’m guessing he hasn’t had much luck with the ladies recently…
I think it’s very sad that people are so desperate for love that they still fall for things like this…
You have to be pretty desperate to ignore all the warning signs.
Just asking for money would have rung alarm bells for me. My kinder side might have been suckered for a modest amount, like £20 or so, but repeatedly asking for larger and larger amounts is an obvious warning sign. Even if she had been genuine on the romantic side, do you really want to be hooking up with a woman who is so obviously inept with her finances that you are going to be impoverished for as long as you are involved with her?
I should add that I might have been suckered by her when I was seventeen, I was pretty naive back then. But, in those days I didn’t have any money so I think that I would have been safe.
We confuse education with knowledge, and intelligence with wisdom.
Education tells you a tomato is a fruit. Intelligence tells you never to put it in a fruit salad.
When I was first diagnosed as a diabetic I was advised by the specialist nurse to buy a book called something like ‘Carbs & Cals’ which listed the carb content of various foods. This is useful as anything that doesn’t come in a sealed package doesn’t have nutritional information on it. I commented that it was a serious omission that the book didn’t give carb content as a percentage and that I was having to calculate the percentages from the information that it did provide. Food packaging does have carb content as a percentage and this makes it dead easy to calculate the overall carb content of your food. The nurse told me that the basic arithmetic required was beyond most of her patients’ abilities. People go to school for over a decade and come out unable to do such a simple calculation. I believe later editions of the book had percentages included, so their must have been some feedback from more numerate diabetics.
Recipes without gram measurements, or ideally % of weight, i.e. most recipes, do my head in. Especially American ones with their ‘cups’ this and that.
I have just bought a set of measuring cups as I have been getting low carb recipes from the internet and quite a few are from the US. the first time that I cook the recipe I weigh everything and then rewrite the recipe with the quantities in grams. I then calculate the percentage and the total carb content and include the information on the recipe.
There, it’s too late to edit it, I’m blaming auto correct.
I was amused by the receipt for the gold naming the scammer as his ‘next of king’!
Would it be really useful to compile a book of stories like this one? I imagine that it would be an entertaining read as we all smugly laugh at what idiots other people (definitely not us though) can be. The good part being that anyone who had read such a book would hopefully be less vulnerable to such scams in the future.
There’s a website (https://aff.419eater.com/) devoted to countering and documenting this stuff – scambaiting, they call it. The site’s been going for nearly 20 years. The bloke behind it brought out a book in 2006 – ‘Greetings In Jesus Name!’ I remember it being a bit of a hoot, if repetitive.
I would expect the stories to share a lot of similarities.
As the saying goes “A fool and his money are soon parted.”