You always think, who falls for this stuff? Well, two years ago, a random service tech came out to my work site and, completely unprompted by me, turned a conve

You always think, who falls for this stuff? Well, two years ago, a random service tech came out to my work site and, completely unprompted by me, turned a conversation about scheduling a follow visit into the story of his current predicament. He wouldn't be able to come out next week because: he was selling his house to fly across the US to meet his girlfriend, whom he had never met IRL. This man was trapped deep in the grips of a traditional romance scam. He went on to tell me how he got to that point of his "relationship". And it sounded like every romance scam you've ever heard. The scammer: only communicated by text, asked for small favors at first, alienated him from his family, changed social media accounts and phone numbers often, claimed she was hacked and it was her photos being used to scam other people, etc. That day I was in shock and the best advice I could muster was something like "be careful before making such life altering decisions". But the encounter bothered me so much that, the next day, I called him and told him the truth, "My dude, you are being scammed." We talked for nearly 2 hours. The sad part was, I could tell he knew it was a scam. He admitted to often being suspicious. He had all the pieces figured out. But for some reason, maybe hope...maybe desperation, he wouldn't put those pieces together. I never heard from that guy again. I really hope he came to his senses, but it sounded like he didn't have much support left around him. Anyways, sorry for the long post. Articles on this topic always bring him to mind.