Valentine's Scam!!

Good evening lovelies and hope you all had an amazing Valentine's day and got some nice gifts. I just finished my works and literally feel so exhausted right now. My daughter is doing her Maths modules right now and God bless my husband as he is teaching her. I dived into Facebook to scroll for memes when I saw a very old friend appearing on my feed after a long time. He was one of my colleagues in the last office I had worked and I commented in one of his posts saying welcome back.. He did not like or reply back but he just gave me a simple "Hi" on my messenger. I'm a person who do not prefer to chat at all. But still, out of respect, I replied him back..

After casual hi and how are you doings, I asked him whats up with him as he did not sound so enthusiastic to me. I asked him why and he said something happened to him last week and he is moody from the incident. I asked him to share it if he likes because I usually do not go around poke into other's business but I wanted to know the issue and give him my support or solutions if any.. He said

"10 days ago, one of my friends messaged me and told me that he had purchased the newly launched I-phone 13 pro and because of some accident in the order, he ended up getting two phones and had to pay for both and he did. He started using one and he wanted to sell the second one for 30% less than it's original price as no one would buy from him at full price.. As a person who was searching for a nice gift for my girlfriend and fiance, I wanted to immediately buy that from him and told him the same. He sent me the video of him unboxing the phone from the box and showing it to me. The new phone was shining and amazing and 30% less to that new phone seems to be such a steal to me..."

"He gave me an address to which I had to send some money and he particularly asked for payment in crypto.. As I have online assets, I paid him through some private crypto and gave him my address. After few days, I got the package. I took the box, immediately gift wrapped it and yesterday, took my girlfriend to a restaurant as a part of Valentine's and gifted her the same. She was so happy and excited when she opened it only to find the phone inside the package was actually a TOY PHONE... not the original one. It looked exactly like the original one. we both were shook and I realized that I was scammed severely. My girlfriend looked at me, thankfully she understood the situation, gave me a hug and told me that she is not disappointed but we need to take a strict action on that guy"

"I immediately called my friend to question him about the situation and he swore on his grave that we never really had that phone selling conversation with him... Turns out, a total scammer had made a complete duplicate profile of my friend's profile online, adding the same pictures etc and messaging me, thus making me not doubt his profile at all. I was actually thinking that I was talking to my friend but I was talking to a random scammer that I did not even know"

My colleague finished saying all this and I felt really bad for him.. it's one thing to lose money in a scam but can you imagine his embarrassment when his gf realized it's a toy phone.. Good for him, his girl understood the situation but if it was somebody else, she would have made fun of him and rushed away from the restaurant. I asked him if he tried to complain it to the police and track him down and apparently he did, but the scammer had used a VPN which cops couldn't trace and because the payment was done in a private crypto, his bank info also couldn't be traced at all.. He literally lost around $700 and also could not gift anything to his girl. His day completely ruined because of one stupid mistake of not realizing whom he was talking to ....What a scam I thought...

Ladies and gentlemen.. there are lot of scammers online... DO NOT buy anything from anybody without DIRECTLY TALKING to them on the phone and also, never ever click any links, EVEN IF YOU KNOW YOUR FRIENDS SENT THEM TO YOU because most of the times, that would be hackers sending you viral links in the name of your friends.. always be alert...

That's all for now guys, Love you my sponsors and friends

Yours bloggingly

@Theblackdoll