🤥 Episode 8 - Excuse Me While I Lie to Myself 🤦‍♀️

What happens when the truth stares you in the face — and you still can’t accept it?

In this painfully honest episode, I take you back to the moment the fairytale started to unravel. A street sign in Hebrew. A reverse image search. A friend’s warning I couldn’t heed.  The signs were everywhere… and I explained them all away.

When the heart wants the fairytale, the mind finds a way to believe it — no matter how absurd it gets.

Transcript

0:03

Episode eight, excuse me, while I lie to myself. To be fair, I was warned. I was given credible warning about Pedro. Early on around April 18th, I confided to a friend that I had met someone online through LinkedIn. I shared a couple of pictures he had sent me and the LinkedIn profile for her to look at. In one of the pictures, he was walking down a cobblestone street looking very handsome and confident. But in this picture, there was a clue that she and her sharp-eyed friend saw and brought to my attention. Pedro told me the picture was taken when he was in Singapore a couple of years earlier. That was a lie behind the man walking was a street sign written in Hebrew. She had been to Singapore and suggested that the surroundings did not look like the picture was taken from there. She also tried to find any other information about him online, and there was only the LinkedIn profile, no Facebook, no Instagram, no other social media site, only LinkedIn. She took all these clues and said, I'm sorry, but this guy is a scammer. Hesitantly she added. They make you fall in love with them and then take your money. I didn't know what to think. Is that true? I thought to myself, but I couldn't make myself believe it. She said, do more research and see what you find. I was staring at the sign, staring at his face. My gut knew, but my brain couldn't catch up. So I reached for a familiar crutch, my old frenemy rationalization. Later I did do a Google search of how to tell if a person you're talking to is a scammer. One bit of advice that came up was to do a reverse image search. I tried it and this was my first shock of many to come. My head started to spin and I couldn't believe my eyes. There were many different websites with the same face, but different names and different occupations. I was dumbfounded. What am I seeing? Why are there so many different names and accounts attached to this same face? Even more horrifying. I found pictures of this man and noticed a wedding ring. There was also a short bio of him, which explained. That he had a wife and six children. There were four separate LinkedIn profiles, all with different names, Pedros, which was in the us, another one in France, one in Germany, and one in Israel. All with different names. He was also on a German dating site on Quora, which I'd never heard of prior to this. His name. There was Jim dfo, who was a self purported Bitcoin enthusiast with a profile that stated if I won the lottery, I wouldn't tell anyone that there would be signs. I was absolutely stunned. I started to shake. I couldn't reconcile what I was feeling with what I was seeing. Just so you're with me, the real man in the photos is Nepali and Israeli businessman with the wife and six kids. Nally, he's the real victim in this story. He was not part of the scam, but simply had his identity stolen by these scammers and used to lure their targets. Pedro, a fiction built on stolen photos and a well-practiced script. This is when fantasy started colliding with reality. I confronted Pedro with what I had found using my very best sailor language. I didn't hold back. I don't want to repeat my exact words in case there may be sensitive ears listening, but after all my expletives, I demanded to know, who are you? Why do you have multiple LinkedIn profiles under different names? I'm showing my ignorance here as well as being. Deeply under his influence. Naftali is everywhere in social media. Pedro is nowhere to be found. He doesn't exist. Pedro, what the hell are you saying? I don't know who is Naftali. The so-called Naftali is impersonating with my pictures and you're here saying, Pedro can't be fined me. That picture you sent me, you told me you were in Singapore. That sign behind you is written in Hebrew. Pedro, can you listen to yourself? Enola? How am I supposed to know it's Hebrew sign? Felt so bad. You can't believe or trust me for once. I can't continue to prove to you am real enola. I have tried to call you on video so we could see each other on camera. We already had plans on seeing by the end of the month. Me, you have crushed my soul. Did you think you would gain one if you took mine? I'm a human being with real feelings, not some target for you to prey on Pedro. Why? Making me feel so bad about the whole thing. Me. You don't think you've made me feel bad? This is all about you. Pedro. What did I do to you? Enola me. You have lied to me. I saw you speaking in Hebrew on your other LinkedIn profile. Many pictures of you is definitely you. You're just toying with me. For some reason, I could not conceive that the person I was talking to didn't look anything like Naftali. I. Naive and ignorant. I was standing in the middle of the battlefield. I had run on to no armor, no weapon, just wide-eyed belief. Pedro, my dear, I am not toying with you, okay? I want the best for us. Me. Take a picture of your passport and driver's license now and send that to me. The passport. It was a joke, a fake. The passport said he was born in California, yet he told me he was born in Spain. He never did send me a driver's license because they didn't have one. Pedro, someone is really impersonating with my profile. I need to stop that. I will do this for you, and after that I will stop communicating with you'cause you have really dealt with my soul emotionally. I need to file reports against this. People impersonating me, me, and so you're telling me to believe what you say only and not to believe the videos and lectures you're presenting online. Am I your midlife crisis fling before you go out back and live with your wife and six kids? I more than anything would love to believe you, but it's difficult with so much information about you online. The thread that kind of ties everything together for me is that everything has to do with trading, investing. The thing you've brought me to consider Pedro. This is Devil trying to ruin what we have built this few weeks. I'm heartbroken. I can't do anything, couldn't concentrate on my work. Devils is trying to use this impersonator to ruin our love. I will urge you, don't allow devil to use you. This clearly shows how deeply confused I am and not wanting to understand what I'm seeing. How could this person from Israel be impersonating Pedro's profile? It makes zero sense. The dissonance was deafening, yet every red flag in front of my eyes was drowned out by the fantasy. I didn't wanna give up. Pedro wanted me to believe that this person in Israel stole his photos, embedded them with his own profile posts. Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous, but I tried my very best to create a scenario to fit the situation. And here's what I came up with. I. Well, I suppose he could actually do both jobs since I'm sure neither the lectures or seminars would be full-time and he doesn't do the oil rig thing full-time. So theoretically he could do both. I was no longer being gaslit by him. I was doing it to myself because when the heart wants something badly enough. It will build a story out of smoke and call it love. I asked him what he was giving a lecture on and he came up with a lame reply saying it was regarding the oil industry. It's crazy, but I decided to go along because I couldn't let go. I didn't want to lose this relationship. I'd been investing so much emotion into rationalization is becoming a daily occurrence lately. He pivoted. He knew I was so confused and he capitalized on that moment. He now modified his story saying that his Aunt Judy raised him, but she lived in Israel and I must have forgotten this part of the story. I continued to question and he continued to adapt his script. This went on for a few days, but in the end we agreed that this modification to his original story was acceptable for now, but would continue when we met back up. I'm a sitting duck at this point, and he knew it. Please learn from my mistakes and do not put yourself through this. Doing a reverse image is absolutely critical. Immediately, once you've been contacted by somebody who wants to strike up a conversation or a friendship with you, look at these accounts, critically study them. When was the account created? How many followers do they have? Does the account have any activity or just pictures? One of these accounts joined in 2013, has over two and a half thousand followers, over 500 connections, and over six years of entries. The fakes were all created in 2020. Has followers in the teens, no written entries, and had different versions or similar occupations. Trust your gut. What is it telling you? What are the possible consequences if you don't take your own advice? The warnings were all there for me. The street sign, the missing social profiles, the reverse image search. But when fantasy is comfortable and the truth is terrifying, the easiest person to deceive was myself. Have you been here feeling the truth, but needing to believe the lie? Know that you're not weak. You're human, and this is exactly why we have to expose this next time. What happens when fantasy takes over and you light a match to your own bank account? Stay tuned. Until then, know that self-compassion isn't weakness. It's resistance.