How Hacks Happen
Hacks, scams, cyber crimes, and other shenanigans explored and explained. Presented by cyber security teacher and digital forensics specialist Michele Bousquet.
How Hacks Happen
Catfishing 2: Money for Love
How do catfish convince victims to send money? In this second of a three-part series on catfishing, we take a tour of the many tricks romance scammers use to separate victims from their hearts, and their cash.
Resources
Can't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Join our Patreon to listen ad-free!
Catfishing 2: Money for Love
Hey, welcome back to How Hacks Happen. I’m Michele Bousquet, and this is part two of our Catfishing series. In the previous episode, I told the story of Mary, who thinks she’s falling in love online with Warden Kennedy, a disgraced cousin of the Kennedy family. But Warden is actually a Nigerian teenager named Parker, who has stolen pictures from a guy named Sam Spikes. Yeah, it’s complicated.
Let’s do a quick recap of Catfishing Part One. Which, if you haven’t listened to it, I suggest you listen to that one first. Here we go.
In Part One we talked about catfishing, which is when someone pretends to be someone else when chatting with people online. Yeah, catfishing is so rampant, that it has its own name.
To pose as Warden Kennedy online, Parker is using pictures of Sam Spikes, a handsome music teacher from Ireland who posts a lot of photos and videos on Instagram. Sam has no idea any of this is going on–he just likes to post on Instagram. But this rich resource gives Parker a lot of material to work with.
Parker has used all manner of technology to convince Mary that Warden is real, and that he’s in love with her. He calls her his queen, he checks in to see if she's had breakfast, he says he loves her. And Mary has fallen for it.
So where does Warden, I mean, Parker, go from here? What’s the scam? Well, let’s find out.
They’ve had a video chat, and Warden has sent Mary a couple of videos of him directly telling her how much he loves her, and they’ve even talked on the phone a few times. Warden’s phone gets terrible reception though, so that part’s been hard, but they chat via text messages all day long.
The next logical step is for the two to meet in person. Right? They’re in love, of course they want to see each other.
They agree that Warden will fly out to Pittsburgh in a couple of weeks. He can’t come right away, he says, because he has an important commitment in a few days: he’s going to Greece for a… Music Education conference. Yeah, that’s it. Music, education. That sounds good. And then right after that, he will come and meet Mary.
Warden promises to chat with Mary every day and he’ll even send photos, and even plans to bring her home a special present. He hints that it might even be an engagement ring.
Hold up, here. What’s really happening? If Warden doesn’t exist, who’s going to Greece?
Let’s take a look at what Parker is actually doing here. In Sam Spikes’ pictures, he found one of Sam posing in front of the Hagia Sophia, which is a famous mosque in Istanbul. And while Istanbul is in Turkey, not Greece, Turkey is pretty close to Greece. Which is actually perfect for what Parker has in mind.
Parker has to send Warden somewhere outside the United States right away, before Warden can meet with Mary, for one very good reason…
The two of them are never going to meet. Ever. Never ever ever EVER.
They can’t meet, because Warden doesn’t exist. But at the same time, Parker needs for Mary to continue to be in love with Warden, for as long as possible. If Warden delays visiting her in Pittsburgh for too long, she might just get on a plane and go look for him herself, at the address he gave her on Long Island. And that can’t happen either, because Warden doesn’t live there!
So at this point, the best way to keep the ruse going is to send Warden far, far away.
But wait a minute, Warden has to come back at some point, right? He’s not moving to Greece.
Ah, grasshopper, you are getting ahead of yourself. Let’s get back to the story and see what’s really going on here.
Warden sends Mary a photo of him at the airport, courtesy of Sam Spikes’ Instagram, of course, and bids her a kissy-kissy farewell until he lands in Athens, which is going to be about twelve hours from then.
Mary waits to hear from Warden after his flight, and she waits, and she waits. She starts to get nervous. Did something happen? She searches for news about plane crashes, but nothing comes up.
Two days later, she finally hears from Warden. And something awful has happened. Warden has been injured, and is now in the hospital. He even sends Mary a photo of him in a hospital bed.
Wow, this is sad. But how did this happen to Warden? Here’s the story.
Oh, hang on. Can I have some action music here?
That’s perfect. Okay, here we go. It’s actually pretty exciting!
Warden had a connecting flight to Athens through Istanbul, in Turkey. While he was at the Istanbul airport, there was this crazy guy harassing people for spare change, or food, or for water or something. Warden doesn’t speak Turkish, so he isn’t really sure what was going on.
Anyway, when Warden sees this guy bothering a young mother with her two little kids, he can’t just stand by and do nothing, now, can he? So he gets into it with this guy, and it turns physical. The guy pops Warden in the jaw and knocks him out. And when Warden lands on the floor, he gets a big gash in his head.
The next thing Warden remembers is waking up in the hospital in Istanbul, Turkey.
Oh wow. Mary is relieved to hear from Warden, but concerned. She asks, “Are you going to be okay?”
Yes, Warden says. He should make a full recovery in a few days. But wait, there’s more.
When Warden was taken to the hospital, the EMTs didn’t grab his suitcase, or any of his stuff, so he got to the hospital with no wallet, no passport, no laptop, no nothing. He doesn’t even have his phone. He had to borrow a phone from a nurse so he could chat with Mary. And he can’t even log into his bank account, because his passwords are all on his laptop.
Mary finds this very upsetting. To be in a foreign country all alone like that, it must be awful.
Then Mary types in the words Warden, I mean Parker, longs to hear. The words he’s waited for all this time.
She says,
“How can I help?”
And so it begins: the final phase of the catfishing scheme, the part that was the end goal all along.
And that is money.
Warden tells Mary that it would be such a huge help if she could send just a few dollars, so Warden can get some new clothes for when he gets out of the hospital. Something like $200. Mary can send it to one of the nurses through CashApp, and the nurse will give Warden the cash in Turkish currency. Sounds good, right?
Now, Warden apologizes profusely for having to ask for this $200, and he promises Mary he will pay her back as soon as he can.
And of course, Mary says yes. This is her boyfriend, after all! And it’s just $200. Not a big deal, right?
Mary sends the money, and Warden thanks her over and over, with more loving words for his special gal.
A few days later, Warden is ready to be released from the hospital, so he can go to the American Embassy and get a new passport. But there’s another problem. The hospital won’t let him go until he pays the bill. Warden gives Mary yet another CashApp address for this payment, and Mary pays the bill.
Now Warden needs to be able to buy a phone so he can keep in touch with Mary. This time he just needs $500, to be sent to another nurse who will give him the cash.
But that nurse turns out to be a greedy liar, and she won’t give Warden the $500. So he asks Mary to send another $500 to another nurse, and that time, everything goes fine and he gets the money, and buys a new phone.
Now Warden can get to the embassy to get a new passport. But there’s a new snag. There’s a fee for the passport application. $350.
And now Warden needs money for a hotel, while he waits to get his new passport. And he needs money for a plane ticket. And for food. $200 here, a thousand dollars there.
Mary is starting to get a little tired of all this. I mean, she has some money set aside for emergencies like this, and she really wants Warden to just come home so they can meet in person. But isn’t there anyone else Warden can ask for the money? What about his family?
Mary asks Warden about this, but he reminds her that he’s the black sheep, an outcast to everyone but his mother. And when he tried to call his mother a couple of days ago, his brother Joe answered the phone, and told him their mother had just had a stroke, and now she’s in a coma, and then Joe hung up on him and now he won’t answer his calls.
Mary is the only one who can help Warden. The only one. And he’s counting on her to help him get out of this mess, to get him home. And as sad as he is about his mother, she’s probably going to die soon, and Warden will get that bit $83M inheritance, and he and Mary can buy that house in the country and he can start his political career, and they’re going to live happily ever after. Remember the dream, Mary, just you and me, together forever.
Mary sends another thousand dollars.
But there are more problems. The airport contacts Warden to say they have his bag and he can come and get his stuff, which is amazing news! But now Warden needs money for the taxi. Then he gets to the airport, and the next thing is, he gets arrested! Somebody planted drugs in his bag, which he swears are not his. I mean, Warden has told Mary several times that he doesn’t do drugs, and she believes him. So Warden needs bail money no w. And after he’s bailed out, he has to stick around for two more weeks until the hearing. The Turkish police say they’ll probably drop the charges, but Warden has to show up at court.
And because of the arrest the embassy is revoking his new passport, and he has to go in and apply for another one. Which means another fee.
A couple hundred dollars here, a thousand dollars there. Sometimes it’s CashApp, sometimes it’s gift cards. And Warden still can’t get home. He buys a plane ticket (with money Mary sent him) but the flight gets cancelled, and it was a non-refundable ticket. Warden drops his phone on the subway tracks and needs money for a new one.
Warden has got to be the unluckiest man ever!
After several months of this, the delays and Warden always needing more money, Mary decides to add it all up, and realizes, to her shock and horror, that she's sent Warden almost $50K. But by this point, she’s super invested in Warden coming home to be with her. And even if she’s starting to get suspicious, she can’t stop now. Warden has to be real, right? All those things he said to her, all those loving words. The way he cried over the memory of his wife. The photo from the hospital. The photo of him in front of the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul. He even sent Mary a photo of the new passport, and the plane ticket he bought. He has to be coming home now, he just has to.
To ease her worried mind, Mary, in a quiet moment, pulls up Warden’s driver’s license. At first, it calms her down to see his ID, to think he trusted her enough to send it to her. But then she notices something odd. The signature on the license looks like it says some entirely different name. Hmm. Maybe he just has a weird signature. But it looks like it says Polly Schneider. What?
So Mary does a reverse image search on one of Warden’s pictures, the one of him standing in front of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Mary did this reverse search before, but it was on another image of his, and nothing came up. But this time, she finds…
Sam Spikes, the music teacher from Ireland.
Sam Spikes? Mary wonders, “Has this guy been catfishing me, pretending to be Warden Kennedy?” Mary scrolls through his profile, and so many of the images are the same as the ones Warden sent her. Mary feels the fury and hurt bubbling up in her when she sees that Sam is married, very much married, with two young kids, and he is most definitely not in Turkey, cuz he just posted a photo of him and his family at the Dublin Zoo.
Mary is furious. Well, she’s going to give this Sam Spikes fellow a piece of her mind. Mary starts typing a long, nasty comment on the zoo photo, calling out Sam as a liar and a cheat. But just as she’s about to hit the Post button, she spots a pinned post on Sam’s profile. It’s a message, saying that he is aware that his photos have been used in romance scams, and there is nothing he is able to do about it. He expresses sympathy for the victims, but says that he’s never received any money from anyone online, nor has he asked for it.
Mary’s stomach sinks as reality sets in. Someone else has been pretending to be Sam, or rather, Warden, using Sam’s pictures. Making up fake documents. Photoshopping pictures.
Warden is never coming home, because Warden doesn’t exist. Mary comes to the stark realization that…
She’s been scammed.
By a catfish.
And that is exactly what’s been happening here. It was a romance scam.
For Mary, it’s humiliating, it’s heartbreaking. It’s not just the money. It’s the fact that Mary thought she had found someone to spend the rest of her life with, and now that person is just…gone.
Let’s give Mary a little privacy while she processes her feelings, and let’s talk about Parker.
Parker is most likely part of a team that operates out of Nigeria. They steal photos of attractive people off of Instagram and make fake profiles, then befriend lonely people online. They follow a script that includes a sob story, and showering their victims with love. They send Photoshopped IDs and photos, and set up fake video chats and make AI-generated videos so they’ll seem legit.
Then they fake some sort of crisis that urgently requires money. If the victim sends even a little money, the catfish knows they’ll send more. And at that point, the catfish won’t ever stop asking. As long as the victim keeps chatting, they’ll keep asking for money.
Because that’s the whole purpose of catfishing here. They do it for the money. Because somewhere, sometime, somebody figured out that romance scams are profitable.
You might wonder, why doesn’t somebody put a stop to this? Can’t the victims sue for fraud? Isn’t catfishing illegal?
Well, yes and no. Setting up a fake social media profile is not illegal. It’s against the terms of service for most of the platforms, but they can’t do much about it other than to take the profile down. And they might not even do that. If a fake profile is reported, Facebook and Instagram unleash their AI bots on it to see if it raises any red flags. And all too often, the bot reports back that No, it’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it.
Tell that to Country star Chase Rice, whose photos have been used so often in romance scams that he actually has an entire page on his website devoted to explaining this. Or Rufus Gifford, former US Ambassador to Denmark, who’s the December 2024 poster boy at the website Scam Haters United, a site for reporting stolen social media profiles. And don’t get me started about Johnny Depp.
As for suing Parker and his friends for fraud, that’s not really feasible. They’re in Nigeria, and while we can use things like IP trackers to pinpoint where they are, the FBI isn’t interested in tracking down these individual scams–they get interested only when it’s a million dollars or more. And your local police, well, they aren’t about to rush down to Nigeria themselves. All we can do is alert the Nigerian authorities, who might do something about it. But some of these scammers are just 16 or 17 years old, working under an older boss who writes the scripts. And as far as they’re concerned, this is just their job. Nigeria doesn’t have the greatest economy, and this is a pretty sweet gig, just chatting with little old ladies all day.
Another thing is that these scammers don’t just target women, either. When they target men, the Parkers of the world will pretend to be a very attractive younger woman, like an OnlyFans model or a porn star, with the sob story that they’re trying to get out of this seedy business but their manager is holding them to an unfair contract. This same manager withholds all their money and won’t let them have access to their bank account. And they’re so happy they met Ralph, the 75-year-old retired construction worker living in a trailer in Alabama, because they know Ralph will treat them right. If only Ralph can send $200 for gas money, just this week. I think you can see wher e this is going.
And if you’ve gotten this far in the story, and still don’t believe it can be this bad, I recommend that you check out the YouTube channel Catfished. The team on Catfished helps people who are in an online romance with a person they’ve never met, someone who keeps asking for money, and they think that maybe they might be getting scammed.
Spoiler alert, 99% of the time, they are. But there you’ll learn how the Catfished team uncovers the truth. You’ll see real people telling their stories, talking about how they met the catfish, how the romance came to be, and how they sent so much money (sooo much money) in dribs and drabs over time. Some of them even went so far as to sell their car or their home to get more money for the catfish, all because they wanted to meet their new love in person. It’s a great learning experience, hearing about the many nuances of the romance scam, and catfishing in particular.
And also hearing how some of the victims respond is pretty educational. A lot of them still don’t believe it, even with all the evidence in front of them. The men in particular have a really hard time accepting the fact that they’ve been sending kissy-face emojis to a teenage boy. Maybe even sending pictures of their junk. Ewww.
One woman, when shown all the facts, said, “I told him, he has to stop asking me for money!” She didn’t seem to understand that the catfish will never stop asking for money. What do you think, the catfish is in it for your scintillating conversation? The entire purpose of them talking to you, is to get money. As long as you’re chatting with them, they’ll ask for money. And they can get pretty nasty about it, too. They threaten them, and tell them they’re ugly and no one will ever love them. This is really hard stuff to hear from someone you think you’re in love with.
Okay, let’s take a peek in at Mary, and see how she’s doing. Hmm, Mary has the chat app open, and there’s a bunch of fresh messages from Warden. What’s that now? He stepped on a nail and needs money for a tetanus shot? I swear, Warden is the most accident-prone man in the history of the universe.
Mary has a couple of choices at this point. Choice #1 is she can block Warden, report the fraud to the police, and get on with her life. That $50K is gone, and she can accept that.
Or Choice #2: Mary can confront Warden about his lies, and unleash her fury on him. This is, unfortunately, the first instinct of the victim. They want to say their piece. And they want the scammer to apologize, and send the money back. Which, I can tell you right now, is never going to happen. And the catfish will use this opportunity to try and keep the victim chatting, so they can, you guessed it, keep the fake love alive, so they can ask for more money.
Is she going to block him and move on? Come on, Mary. Block him. Do it. Block him, and call your daughter. Then go to Bingo. Just press the button, Mary. Do it. Do it–
Oh! She didn’t block him. She’s typing a message to Warden now. I know it’s a scam, how could you do this to me, yada yada, send my money back. Oh, Mary, Mary.
And here’s Warden, replying. No, baby, I’m real. I want to get home to you so bad, I love you, blah blah blah.
Okay, Mary’s responding now. I’m not sending you any more money.
Wait for it…wait for it…
What do you mean, no more money? I thought you loved me.
She’s walking away from the computer. She’s walking away. That’s good, I think.
Now she’s back, she’s back. Your love for me shouldn’t depend on me sending you money. I know this is sad, Mary. Just let it out. Let it out, honey. Here’s a tissue.
Mary: Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Oh, he’s getting angry. Good. All capital letters! I NEED YOU TO SEND THE MONEY NOW!!
Please when will you send the money
It needs to be Steam gift cards
Ooh, capital letters again. SEND THE MONEY!!!
Does Mary finally understand that there’s no point in talking to this guy, ever again?
She blocked him. She blocked him!
And on that high note, we bring this episode to a close. In part three, we’ll talk about how catfish can also trick their victims into participating in committing a felony. But that will have to wait. Let’s give Mary some time to recover before we throw her into the fire again, shall we?
Shout-out to Katie Haze of Katie Haze Productions for producing this episode. See you next time on How Hacks Happen.