Shadow People, Real Life Pain
It started on Facebook.
A friend request from a friend of a friend, a wave on messenger, a few weeks of witty banter that turned into texting, then phone calls. We talked about art, about Paris (his hometown and one of my favorite cities) about politics, literature, poetry.
An intimate relationship was the farthest thing from my mind when I started talking with Jon in 2018. I wasn’t even looking for new friends — the only Facebook “friends” I was interested in making were others involved in the political groups I’d become active in after the 2016 election. But I was intrigued by the chance to practice French with a native speaker, especially since our conversations were not just entertaining but substantive. Soon we were communicating three, four, even five times a day. A Sorbonne-educated artist living in Austin, Texas, he was erudite, intellectual, talented and, as I saw when we exchanged photos, very handsome. Though I wasn’t (strictly) interested in romance, the man in the pictures was pretty much my physical ideal, with the tres sexy French accent to match. And he thought I was his ideal too — an American woman with a solid bank account he could ruthlessly manipulate into financial and emotional ruin.
As it turned out, we were both wrong.
In the beginning, his enchanting conversation, insightful critiques and handsome face rendered them nearly invisible, but now when I look back at our relationship all I can see are the red flags. The first time he asked me for money was when a shipment of valuable Mexican antiquities he was awaiting was held up by customs and I said no. The second time he was about to lose out on an incredible job opportunity in New York because his bank account had been frozen — a result of the Mexican antiquities customs fiasco — so I lent him enough to buy a plane ticket, wiring it to a stranger’s bank account since his was inaccessible. Then his camera was broken while he was in New York so he couldn’t send me any pictures of himself in front of landmarks. We had a relationship-ending fight right before he was supposed to buy a ticket to join me and a friend on vacation in California. I went anyway, determined not to think about him, not to let him ruin my time, but somehow he’d managed to make himself the focus even more than if he’d been there with us. He would call in the middle of the week to say how sorry he was, how he missed me, loved me, wanted to be with me and move to my state. He said that he’d been so devastated after our fight, thinking he’d lost me, that he had fled back to Paris and was staying with his brother, but now everything was clear. He couldn’t wait to come back, back home, back to me: if I could just wire money for the planet ticket to his friend’s account…
It was when he failed to call after his flight from Paris had landed in the US that the enchantment wore off and I was able to see the red flags clearly. I had been tricked. For nine months I had been involved in an ever-deepening relationship with a devious, manipulative con-man.
My head understood that instinctively, but my heart was recalcitrant. It refused to believe unless it saw proof — proof that the man in the picture was not who he said he was, not Jon the brilliant French artist who loved me. The only way to get proof, I realized, was to turn the tables. For the next nine months, I led him on, pretending to be pliant mark while I wrung every shred of evidence I could from him in my search to find the true identity of the man in the photos. I began to run his photos through phone search engines, but got no matches. I also posted them to message boards about romance fraud, but that didn’t yield any immediate results either, so I began studying everything else in the photos for clues about where they had been taken. I followed streets signs to intersections on Google Maps, looking for landmarks, searching business directories for names partially glimpsed on storefronts; I even scanned the websites of hotels and conference centers trying to match the carpet that appeared in the background of one of the photos. My desire to learn the truth kept me in a state of tension between fury and hope, which made the charade of my interactions with Jon exhausting.
I called the local police for help but the officer who came to take my statement scolded me and then never filed a report. As I was to learn, his disrespectful and dismissive attitude is the norm at every level of law enforcement, as well as every tech company, as if I were the one who had done something wrong and violated the law, rather than the man who stole from me. I posted parts of my story to the FTC website on four different occasions, and tried to file a report with the FBI but could not get anyone to listen. I flagged Jon’s fake profile on Instagram but despite their supposed policy against identity theft, it was allowed to stay up. Since he blocked me on Facebook I had another friend report his multiple profiles there, with the same result. Even some of the support groups for victims of romance fraud I joined seemed more concerned with skimming money from their members than facilitating their quest for justice.
Nine months after I realized I’d been scammed, I finally learned the true identity of the man in the photos. He is not French, nor an artist, nor a resident of Austin, Texas. The pictures were stolen from the real man’s Facebook page and used in multiple false profiles that scammed at least five women. (I said he was good looking!!) I found him with the help of two friends I made in the course of my investigation both of whom had also suffered at the hands of romance scammers. We got no help from the police, FBI, Facebook or Instagram, even when we presented them with documentation of identity theft, the account numbers of the money mules Jon was still using to launder funds, and evidence that he was actively targeting new victims on social media. The cruelly complicit silence and inaction of tech and law enforcement made it impossible for me to get real justice. Indeed, the only closure I got came from my scammer himself.
In January of this year he agreed to let me interview him. Our conservation ranged broadly, but two things stood out. He told me I had been an unusually challenging target and that although I accounted for relatively little of the $500,000 he snared from women he met on social media and dating apps in 2019, he had enjoyed our time together because I was smart. When I asked what he did with all that money he said he only got a percentage. The rest went to his boss. No independent operator, he is a part of an organized criminal network abusing American tech platforms to prey on American citizens. He told me I would never even get close to taking him down. He and his colleagues were “shadow people,” he said, their identities as irresponsible and untouchable as the platforms they’re built on.
That is the shadow cast by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that shields tech firms from liability for hosting criminal content, even when they know it’s there. As long as tech platforms face no penalty for hosting scammers, that shadow will continue to grow. By conservative estimates Americans lost $473M to romance scams originating online in 2019 alone. How many more people’s dreams and life savings will that shadow be allowed to blot out before lawmakers take steps to shine a light on it?
