Episode 12 — 🔄🎭 Oops, I Did It Again! The Search for Closure 🎭🔄

After my first disaster, I needed more than closure — I needed the truth. This episode follows my painful journey chasing the “real man” behind a fake profile, hoping to find answers and redemption.

But chasing closure led me into a second scam, where the same patterns played out again — the lies, the manipulation, the gut-wrenching betrayals. I recount my cautious attempts to connect, the video chats, and the shocking revelations that left me questioning everything once more.

Through this raw, personal story, I explore the brutal psychology of a second scam — how trauma and hope can trap us in a cycle that’s hard to break.

If you’ve been caught in a similar cycle or know someone who has, you’re not alone. This episode offers compassion, hard truths, and a call to stay vigilant before the red flags become too entangled in the heart.

Trigger warning: Emotional trauma, betrayal, financial loss.

Transcript

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Episode 12. Oops, I did it again. The search for closure. Welcome back and thanks for joining me after the Pedro Disaster. I didn't just want closure. I needed it. I wanted to believe that somewhere behind that fake profile, there was a real man who hadn't lied to me. I wasn't gonna get any closure from Pedro. That was just a stark and dismal ending. I had to know the truth. I was searching to find a way out of my isolation and shame. I needed redemption. I figured if I at least warned the man who actually owned that kind face, I'd be doing something, trying to set things right in my own mind to warn, to connect, to heal my own heart. I was still in a very dark place and vulnerable state of mind. I wondered if this Israeli businessman knew that his pictures were out there being used online as bait for scammers. I threw out the idea to a few people that I thought I should try and find and warn him, but they thought I should just drop it. Well, of course I couldn't get the thought out of my head so I searched for him. Looking back on it now, I was like an addict. That relapses right after deciding to get clean. I got back on Facebook and looked him up there. There was his page from Israel, but there'd been no entries for the last couple of years. Then I saw another Facebook page with a different picture of him, and when I looked more closely, his profile said he was living in Los Angeles and was separated. This new profile had been set up less than a year earlier, so it appeared he was in the process of getting a divorce and moved to the us. I contacted him via Messenger and waited. A few days passed, but one day I woke up and noticed there had been a call from him at 6:00 AM that morning. I started trembling it. Took a few back and forth exchanges, but he immediately wanted to do a video chat to see if I was, who I represented myself to be. Well, I don't know any woman that wants to be on camera as soon as they wake up in the morning, but I tried to pull myself together and get on the phone as I thought this would be good to see who I was talking to, and I wouldn't accept the type of video chat I had with Pedro. Again, there was a thick accent, and even though I'd been to Israel before, I couldn't really identify it. We spoke for a few minutes and then agreed to another video chat later that day, as he said he had to go to work Now, he said he was in Illinois on a job and had been there since December but would soon be heading back to la. During the next video call, there was a glitch in the transmission, but in the meantime, I managed to grab a screenshot. That screenshot made me sure this time I was speaking with the true natally. I wondered why he had separated and moved to the us. He told me his wife had cheated on him with one of his best friends, and that his two youngest children were not his biological children. He only found this out when he had to take one of his youngest sons into the hospital for some testing and apparently found it out. Then his two youngest appeared to be around five and seven years old from the Facebook profile. So he apparently lived not knowing this revelation until recently when I looked at the family page, I didn't see a different look to either one of the youngest boys. So you can see where this is headed, right? Well, you're not wrong. I thought I was chasing closure, but I think I was still trying to rewrite the ending of the Pedro story, and I was willing to believe almost anything to do it. We began chatting, but I was more cautious this time, or at least I thought I was. Unfortunately, for me, it was almost like this new relationship picked up with a last one left off before it went sour. Again, Naftali told me he would be going back to LA in a few weeks, but wouldn't be able to meet up with me until around Easter. I made a deal with myself that if the guy flakes on me this time, I'll walk away for good. I told him what I'd been through and he said he was sorry I had to go through all that. After a couple of weeks of texting, he said he thought he found me on Telegram and wanted to know was that me. Immediately a warning flare went off in my head and I demanded, how do you know about that? Are you Pedro? I was so afraid and paranoid I'd walked back into the same trap. He kept reassuring me that he was not Pedro, but I had grown very suspicious of Telegram in the past year, and the people who use it. Then he asked if I'd ever used crypto. Said he knew of a great investment opportunity. My stomach dropped. This was Pedro's script all over again. It took a lot of convincing and reassurance, but he said that when I told him my story, he felt really bad for me and wanted to help find a way for me to recoup my money. I really wanted to believe that he wanted to help me. I'm still desperate for money at this point. Mind you, I. From February through October of 2024, the same manipulations unfolded as what I had been through with Pedro, our planned meeting where he had to unexpectedly leave for Australia the day prior, the emergencies that created the need for cash. I didn't have much left to give, but what I did, I handed over to him at his insistence. I signed up with yet another crypto company because he assured me this is the way to recoup my losses. After all I'd seen his face. This time we talked much more on the phone than I ever did with Pedro. We video chatted several times. Even though I convinced myself I was talking to the right man this time, I still had this gnawing feeling that something wasn't right. I got confused all over again. I asked myself the same question over and over, how could I fall for the same patterns after all I'd been through? And the truth is the psychology of the second scam is as brutal and predictable As the first. So to make a long story short. The second scam ended when Nelli had supposedly returned but kept putting me off. I was so tired of all the excuses and the delays. It's an hour and a half flight from where I live to get to la. So I told him I was coming and he better pick me up at the airport. I flew there and waited. He never showed. He sent me some sort of cryptic text, several hours into my wait at the airport. I immediately called him back, but he didn't answer. I decided I'd better just go home rather than be stuck in la. I was angry and despondent. Why wouldn't he meet me the next day? When I spoke with him, he said he had been trying for weeks to tell me something, but then he would never follow through with these thoughts. When he finally did, he said he was going to video chat with me. I was anxious, but part of me still hoped for clarity, closure, something. I took a deep breath and picked up the phone bracing for another lie. But what I saw shocked me just as deeply as anything Pedro had done on the other end was not nepali's face, it was a stranger, but the voice I associated with Naftali, who was this person? The young man who claimed to be from Nigeria told me to forget Naftali, that Naftali was dead. He said that during the course of our communications these past months, he had fallen in love with me and now he wanted me to love him instead of natally. He apologized for the lies and he said he was going to build us a house right there on the land he was walking on. It was earth shaking. My brain was like a volcano erupting. The shock of seeing a different man than I had believed I'd been talking to for the last 10 months. It defies words, logic. How could this happen to me again? Why would he be revealing himself to me now? The idea of me being able to turn off feelings I thought I had for NA and turn them onto someone who just scammed me for the last 10 months, absolutely ridiculous. My instinct was just to crawl under my covers and disappear, I found myself back where I left off with Pedro grieving and infuriated at the same time for allowing someone to deceive me yet again. This was now October, 2024. I was already formulating ideas of telling my story when I remembered what the federal agent asked me to do last time, which was to keep in contact with him for now, and maybe I could learn something about him that I could use for this series. I also wondered if the crypto account could be real as this man who calls himself. Ben kept assuring me that it was, and if so. I still needed his help to transfer it out and somehow into my bank account. During the course of these last months, the original crypto company had supposedly gone through a merger with another crypto company. The customer support people told me to sign up for an account with Coinbase so that they could transfer the funds, which supposedly is in the neighborhood of 200,000 now, and once I had done that, I could request the crypto be transferred into that account from Coinbase. I could then exchange the crypto back into dollars and deposit into my bank. I complied with what I was told to do and requested the transfer of Bitcoin once the crypto was deposited. I searched about how to exchange it and transfer, but I couldn't find any answers to my questions anywhere within the week of the crypto being in my Coinbase account, the total went from 200,000 to around$800,000. I was shocked at this and wanted to get the money out as soon as possible, but I wasn't finding the help I needed. I turned to my brother again. And showed him the total amount in my Coinbase. He asked if this was real and I replied, well, it's in my Coinbase so I can only assume that it was, I had high hopes, and so did my brother. He made a call and referred me to a friend who works for a known, credible finance company who also has crypto experience. I met with this representative as he worked on a solution, but as he researched, I wasn't feeling any positive vibes from his end. It eventually became clear that there was something wrong. Surprise. What looked to be like Bitcoin wasn't Bitcoin. It was a worthless knockoff, a fake coin from a fake company. Digital dust. The crushing despair came racing back. I asked the friend to break the news to my brother as I didn't have the words or the strength. I just couldn't seem to catch a break. Why did these things always fall apart during the Christmas season? My sons and I did not celebrate Christmas last year. We didn't even bother putting up a tree. It's uncertain if we will this year or anytime in the near future. The most important piece of advice I can give you about online romance scams is this. The red flags are much easier to spot when you're not emotionally involved. Once you're caught in their web of manipulation, which is disguised as intimacy, it becomes almost impossible to see the truth. The key is to protect yourself before they gain that influence. Stay alert, stay skeptical. Don't let them get that foot in your door. I'm not a psychologist, I only have my own experience I can speak to, but in doing some research to try and figure out why I went down that same rabbit hole I had just tried to escape from, I came across these following ideas that helped me explain what was happening. Number one, I was trying to reclaim my narrative When someone uses a fake identity, a face, a name, a life they steal, not just money, but a story that I thought I was part of. It's disorienting, unfinished, like a door slammed in my face without warning. So I did apparently, what many trauma survivors do? I looked for the truth. For the real man behind the mask, because if I can find him, maybe the experience would make sense. Maybe I can reclaim my identity. Maybe there'd be something real to salvage. It's meaning making a core human drive, but it's also risky because scammers know that people do this and they set traps waiting for you to come searching. Number two, I was primed, not just once, but twice. The first scam conditioned me to believe in love at a distance to believe a man like that could really care about me. To believe that persistence and patience pays off. So when I chased the real man behind the pictures, I wasn't just making a fresh choice. I was acting from a brain still wired by the first betrayal. That doesn't mean I'm broken, apparently. It means I was still healing, still searching for answers, and the second scammer just exploited that open wound number three. I was trying to prove it wasn't all a lie. Sometimes we chase the real person because we want to prove we didn't fall in love with a ghost. We hope that somewhere in the ashes there's still an ember of truth. I wasn't chasing a scam, I was chasing something real to hold onto, and that's where it gets cruel. Scammers use that very hope. The hope that there's still something redeemable as bait. So what does that say about me? It says I am human. I was brave enough to look for answers. I was still healing when I was hit Again, I was seeking resolution and didn't deserve the deception that followed. It doesn't say I'm foolish or naive, or a slow learner. It says I was trying to survive the trauma. The only way I knew how by finding meaning. And unfortunately, that search got hijacked. I thought I was chasing closure, but what I really needed was to tell the truth, this truth out loud, so it can't haunt me anymore in silence, in case you're wondering, no, I'm not chasing enough tally anymore. I did finally find him and reached out to him in an email to warn him about how his pictures were being used on social media used as bait for people like me. He did write me back, but I think he misunderstood my intentions as a third try At love was not what I was looking for. Why would I want to carry on an affair with somebody halfway around the world married with everything I'd been through? I was looking for something though, if I'm being honest. Friendship, a collaborator, somebody to help me with this podcast. I knew he had that experience, but I see that was misguided enough. Tally, if you happen to be listening, just know I never meant to disrupt your life. I can tell you today that I'm hyper aware of these scammers. And hope to make you just as aware so you don't go near that destructive rabbit hole. I, again, turn to you for knowledge. Tell me what's similar, what's different with your experience. So if this has happened to you more than once, just know this. You're not stupid, you're not broken, you're human and I see you. The road out of this isn't shame, it's rebellion. Email me at Romance Scam rebellion@gmail.com. Until then, stay strong, stay sharp. And remember, self-compassion isn't weakness. It's resistance. I.