Czytaj książkę: «A love scammer ruined my life»

I had found him, the man I loved, respected, believed, and trusted. I wanted to spend my life with him, but he was to turn out to be my emotional and financial ruin.

September 2014 to February 2016

After my divorce and a long sojourn in Italy, I registered with Facebook so I could carry on talking to my friends from Italy in Italian. Before too long, I was getting numerous friend requests, primarily from males, but as a rule, I chose to ignore or reject them, because I prefer to know my “friends” personally.

However, I did accept one of these requests and this was the man I fell in love with.

I got to know him under a different name, but I’ll still use Chrisben as this is the name he uses on the internet when looking for new victims.

Chrisben from New York City was very good- looking, seemed authentic, spoke English, was 53 years old, and had a 10-year-old daughter. He allegedly ran an automotive design company.

I had my misgivings as my English is pretty bad and just hoped that Chrisben spoke German or Italian.

Unfortunately he didn’t, only English. However, I now know that he has another native language.

We got chatting, me with my bad English and the aid of a translation program.

He always greeted me with “hello my friend”.

‘Why do you always call me that?’ I asked.

‘You are the only friend I have,’ was his reply. And indeed, there wasn’t a friend to be seen anywhere on Facebook. From then on, I was his only friend.

Chrisben asked me to be online to chat every night at 10. Well, he had to work at his company, but we wanted to chat after 5. In his actual homeland it was midnight.

So this was the way it was. I was always a little afraid to think, or write something wrong, but we always managed to understand each other, chatting about trivial matters, a bit of small talk.

But soon, he started telling me about his failed marriage, his ex-wife, who was from the Ukraine, and his beloved daughter, who lived with his parents. He talked a lot about his marriage, but never about any of the good things, and certainly never anything positive about his ex-wife. I had to make him stop, I hated it.

‘A divorce is hardly ever a positive experience, but I bet there were some good times in your marriage, too,’ I told him. This put a stop to it; after all, it was in the past.

I also told Chrisben about my divorce, but I never said a bad word about my ex-husband. I confided a lot to him about my life at the time, my family, and my job.

Maybe I just needed to talk and somehow I trusted him. I told him so much that he knew precise details about me. This is exactly what he wanted, so he could get to know me better. In this way, Chrisben cleverly earned my trust.

We used to chat nearly every day with a few exceptions. I really looked forward to the time I spent with him … I had fallen in love. But I kept it to myself for now. Always polite and never pushy, I slowly got to know him better. I realised he was a businessman through and through, but also lonely and extremely vulnerable. In my bad English, I called him my “little bear”, which he loved. How he laughed about that one.

How right I was too. I now know that I was just another business prospect for him.

With great skill and cunning, he showered me with compliments, flattering me with his sweet words. He also sent me wonderful pictures of himself. I was happy, I had constant butterflies, and always looked forward to 10 pm, because that was when we had our chat date.

One morning, I unexpectedly got a message from Crisben. Oh my goodness, two pages of red hearts and two pages of I love yous, and so many kisses.

I was so happy, literally bursting with hope and joy. I felt real love for this man.

The time had come to declare my love for him. We were both so happy. At least, it seemed that way.

He asked me if he was allowed to make our relationship public on Facebook. I said yes. I wanted only him. He was my life. A ring from him sealed our relationship.