Dark Downeast - INTRODUCING: Chameleon

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Face Plant: The Woman With 1,000 Boyfriends — What's it like to have your image used as the bait in thousands of online romance scams? This is what happened to Janessa Brazil—a cam girl whose image has been hijacked and used to con hundreds, maybe thousands, of lonely people out of hard-earned cash. This is a story of love, lies, and the faces behind a billion-dollar underground industry.Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audiochuck.Follow Chameleon on Instagram @chameleonpod Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey everyone, it's Kylie Lowe here. If you've listened to Dark Down East for a while, you know I'm drawn to stories where nothing is quite what it seems. And I've got a real special interest like obsession level with stories of catfishing, the layers, the psychology, the way people can perform an entire life online and get away with it. So that's exactly why I want to tell you about Chameleon, a weekly podcast from Audio Check and Campside Media. Chameleon dives deep into stories of people who hide in plain sight. They manipulate, they deceive, and they build identities so convincing that by the time the truth comes out, the damage is already done.

In the latest episode, host and journalist Josh Dean unpacks the jaw-dropping case of Camgirl Janessa Brazil. Her image was stolen and used to catfish and scam hundreds, possibly thousands of people, out of millions of dollars. victims were convinced they were in real relationships, sending money, sharing secrets, and falling in love, all with someone who didn't know they existed. It's a story about lies, intimacy, and a massive underground industry built on deception. I could not stop listening.

Like, I even took the podcast into the shower with me because I was so into it. I knew I had to share this story with you too. So my friends at Camelion are sharing this case with us so that you can hear the full episode right here, right now. And after you're done listening, you can find more stories like this on Camellion wherever you get your podcasts. Hello? What is, what do you want me to say? And it's just a... Camelian. Camelian Weekly.

Oh. So there was this journalist in England who got what so many of us get, which is like the ping on the Twitter or in your inbox. or in your messages saying, hey, I really like the photos that you posted. This is Katrina Onstad, a podcast producer and journalist in Canada, talking about Simon de Brassell, who, for the past 20 years, has been a correspondent for the Times of London. Simon received this message on New Year's Eve 2018.

The sender went on to introduce herself. My name is Shrilly. Not Shirley, but Shrilly, S-H-R-I-L-E-Y. And this journalist, Simon, was quite intrigued and began a kind of conversation with this person on the other end of these texts. Gradually, message by message, a relationship began to form. He's a bit older, so I think he didn't really understand that this is a common experience of life online. He ended up talking to this person who presented herself as an American in Flint, Michigan, a mother, a hard worker, an environmentalist,

and he was quite intrigued by her. Shrilly shared photos, too. She was, I'm sure, most people would agree, incredibly beautiful. The two were trading messages most days, often many times a day, and grew quite close. Pretty soon, Simon found himself falling for this woman he'd never met. And then all of a sudden she started asking for money. The bells didn't go off quite as quickly as I think they might to someone who's a little more online,

but he eventually sort of got the sense that maybe this wasn't all kosher. She ended up pinging him from what she said was a hotel in Toronto. She was trapped there in a snowstorm. They had taken her passport, and she needed help to get back. Creeping doubts aside, Simon was enraptured. He wanted to ignore these doubts. but his journalistic radar was beginning to twitch, and he starts to do a little investigating.

He finds other people online, talking about being scammed by a woman using some of the same images Shrilly had sent him. He's sort of investigating this now as a journalist, wondering if he's being scammed. He presses Shrilly for answers. Why am I seeing your pictures used in these online romance scams? And who is Janessa Brazil,

the name that seems to often be associated with these images. Shrilly reassures him. She's got a good explanation. When he confronts her, she says, actually, yeah, lots of people are using my image online in scams. And thank you for discovering this. Thank you, because I am the real Genese of Brazil,

and my life has been made a living hell. My funds have been frozen. I'm the subject of lawsuits, and I really need your help, actually. Now that the whole truth is out, she says, she and Simon can really get close. And then she sort of double scams, right? So it's always like scam on top of scam in this story. It was such a labyrinth to navigate.

Simon isn't totally at ease. He's skeptical. That's the journalist in him. But a big part of him, his emotional core, still believes that this could be real. He wants this to be real. So he agrees to help shrilly out again. He sends her some. money via PayPal.

The least he can do to help his online girlfriend escape Toronto. But there's one problem. PayPal says, no, you can't transfer this money because this money is going to West Africa. And then the scales fell from his eyes

that he kind of snapped to and realized, oh God, I'm still being scammed. It's just that the scam is always taking a new shape. This is A Weekly Look at the many faces used by scammers and con artists. I'm Josh Dean.

This week we ask, Who is the woman whose image became the face of catfishing scams around the world? And who's really behind this con? This is Camellion Weekly. The PayPal News broke the spell. Simon de Brousel was now sure he was being scammed. He'd been catfished. Lured into an intimate online-only relationship with someone pretending to be,

a sexy American single mom named Shrilly, who'd set out to gain his trust with the aim of extracting money from him. To help himself get over the shock, sadness, and embarrassment, Simon decided to go on the offensive and investigate his own scam. And what he found is that the photos Shrilly had shared of a stunning brunette had been used in numerous other romance scams around the world. And this scammer, whoever it was, most often went by the name Janessa Brazil. He found the name mentioned Over and Nessor.

over on the message boards where scam victims gather and trade stories. She became like a white whale. People are all over the internet asking, who is this? Who is Jedessa Brazil? Did she get in your pocket? Did she get into your head, your heart? And we wanted to find out why this one image and this name was everywhere. Like who is the actual face?

Who are the humans at the center of these elaborate, elaborate schemes? This was the jumping off point for a quest that ultimately became a podcast called Love Genessa, produced by Katrina Onstad, and hosted by the British Nigerian journalist Hannah Ajalah, an investigation that led Katrina and Hannah and their team to a very real human behind the mysterious name. So Janessa Brazil was what you would call like an early adopter of the online sex culture. She was a camgirl with a large audience. Camgirls were an early internet phenomenon. women who would perform on camera.

Not necessarily doing amateur porn, just living their lives, but also sometimes taking off their clothes. Before there was only fans, she had a subscription-only service, and she was making, she says, at one point about a million dollars a year. She really understood that space

and posted a lot of images before everybody shared everything on social media. She was sharing not just sexually explicit, pictures and not just performing shows, but also pictures of herself grocery shopping and doing her laundry. It was actually those pictures that made this former camgirl the perfect cover for catfishers. Because there was so much out there. So when the scammers needed to be roping in their victims and showing them evidence that Janessa Brazil was a real person, they could say, this isn't just a sexual thing. Like, here's me going to the flower market today. Here's me going

have to dinner with my friends. And so unbeknownst to her, she sort of unleashed her image in this way that we all do very casually now. But she was early. Like this was kind of the, you know, the early 2010s. In those days, Janessa had a huge online presence. She had a very big following. She was an adult entertainer. She wasn't a porn star.

She wasn't having sex with people, but she was performing. And she could charge like 100 bucks for five minutes. that kind of camgirl celebrity. But despite this, the real Janessa Brazil was surprisingly hard for the podcast team to track down. In Janessa's line of work, you can imagine that having obsessive fans knowing where to find you would be a problem. They ultimately found Vanessa through an old friend of hers, a radio DJ named, and for those who haven't had the privilege, I swear this is real, Bubba the Love Sponge. This might hurt a bit ready.

I'm already doing it. Welcome to the Bubba the Lovespun Show. Bubba, real name Todd Allen Clem, is an American shock jock radio star who learned his brash, hypersexualized broadcasting style from the school of Howard Stern, who was also somewhat familiar with Janessa.

I was on Janessa's website. Genessa Brazil. Yeah, that's her met up. Very impressive name. There she is. There's her nice ass. Vanessa was a kind of regular on the Bubba the Love Spun show.

And the fact that her image was being used in catfishing schemes, came up a few times. Turns out it wasn't a recent phenomenon. And in fact, I'm in a full-blown direct message conversation with a person that's trying to tell me their Janessa. Okay. You know that. I show that to you.

And they live in Sweden and they want their money. There's no news to me. It's been happening for years. And now they're calling me Clem. Like, you know, you don't like what I call you Clem now. I don't think I've ever called you that. Bubba and Janessa became close, and she even lived with him for a while as a Platonic roommate.

Katrina knew that she had to get to Bubba to get to Janessa. So trying to get him was amazing because if you call his number, you get like a racetrack, like a Bubba to sponge racetrack or something. Please check Bubba Raceway Park.com for times and pricing. Thanks so much, and we hope to see you here at the race track. We were always leaving messages at this racetrack and just trying to, anyway. Finally, Bubba called back. He was protective of Janessa at first.

It was a really fascinating conversation with him. Like, he was in his studio, which had a shower booth, like, behind him in case, like, porn stars wanted to come by. And he facilitated an introduction. And I think she didn't really want to be found, you know? Like, she wanted a modicum of privacy. and we were lucky enough that he trusted us enough to put us in touch. Her name, as you've surely guessed, isn't actually Janessa Brazil. Her name is Vanessa.

I'm not going to say her last name because obviously she's trying to live a private life. We found her in a small town in the States. I'm not going to say where. And she told us her story. And it was, it's a real gut punch of a story. Like she came to the United States with her mom as a child from Brazil. They didn't have a lot of money. They came here.

Her mom had been a dentist at home. But when she came here, she started stripping. Then she eventually started making clothes for strippers. Vanessa learned this skill from her mom, started to help, and ultimately saved enough money from making clothes for dancers to put herself through private school. Or she did very well. College was obviously next. And when she went to apply, she discovered she was actually undocumented.

It's so interesting. It's just like you see all the paths that a life can take and when one door slams, her life just feared it in a completely different direction. So suddenly her opportunities narrowed. Vanessa didn't go to college. She fell in love and got married. And then her career as a cam girl got started, prompted by a very unlikely event. A serious car accident that led to a settlement. With the money from that car accident, she got a boob job and started performing online, like just posting pictures and then gradually doing kind of camming after work. And her husband was sort of her agent, helped her with this. They both profited from it.

And she looked at it as a kind of innocuous side hustle. A pretty easy and increasingly lucrative side hustle with one particular and highly unexpected byproduct. Things were going pretty well. But every once in a while, she would get these little messages saying, hey, you know, you're my wife. I thought you were going to stop doing this. Aren't we in love? We already talked about this.

Here she is talking about it on the podcast, Katrina produced. This guy comes into my chat and he says that we're married. I was like, I'm sorry, what? And they're like, you're my wife. And you told me you were going to quit. this. And I went, is this guy joking with me? Is this like a prank? And I was like, why don't you sign me an email and tell me what's going on? And that's when I started to realize what was happening. Gradually, it became clear to her that she had provided this deep well of images and

experiences for scammers to draw upon and that they were kind of pulling from her own imagery and creating these composite Janessa Brazils and using them as the bait in these elaborate catfishing schemes. And she was bearing the brunt of this because people would call and be super pissed off, right? They'd lost lots and lots of money. And actually, part of it that I think when we talked to her that she found even more troubling was how heartbroken they were. Like, they really truly believed that she was in love with them and had not delivered on that love. Like, these were really, really gutted men.

It's impossible to know how widely Janessa's image was disseminated and used in catfishing scams. Katrina guesses that number is in the thousands, as in thousands of men who were targeted for a variety of sums. Like, she would get calls saying, I lost $70,000, $50,000, $5,000. It was a lot of money. This really reached a peak in 2016, when Vanessa decided she'd had enough.

She went dark and tried to fade back into America. I think having to absorb the vitriol of that many people who felt that she had ruined their lives, I mean, it's hard to imagine what that would feel like. You haven't done anything, but you have to bear the front of it. After the break, the hunt for the people behind those images and how they weaponized one woman's photos as part of an entire catfishing industry. Welcome back to Camellia.

The Love Genesea team was able to trace many of the scammers using Vanessa's images to a single region, where Simon was told his PayPal money was about to be sent. West Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana in particular is the global hub for romance scams, which is why the Love Genessa team needed someone who knew the region and its culture to help them investigate. That's what led British Nigerian journalist Hannah Azala to join the team. I'm a journalist, reporter, but yeah, if I haven't mentioned the word traveler,

that is definitely one thing that I absolutely love to do. It's open up my eyes in terms of, you know, the places, the communities, and the people that I've crossed paths with. The Love Genessa producers had seen Hannah's, work and reached out. It didn't take much convincing. It definitely took the whole idea of catfishing to another level. And the fact that it became part of what I tend to describe as a global catfishing phenomenon was something that enticced me to want to discover more of the story, especially knowing that this woman's face also held prominence in West Africa, in Lagos, Nigeria, specifically

as well, where I was when I first heard about Janessa Brazil. You probably already associate West Africa with scamming to some extent. The Nigerian prince asking for a bank account to store huge amounts of money is the classic. Known as a 419 scam after the part of the Nigerian criminal code that deems this illegal, that trick goes all the way back to the 1980s and was definitely one of the earliest scams to take advantage of the nascent internet, specifically using email. It's come a long way since then. We really wanted someone with familiarity with that zone of the world. So she went there to try and meet a kind of criminal subculture called the Sakawa Boys.

So Sakawa is the Hausa language spoken in many parts of the African continent, and it literally means to be put inside, but it's been associated with a colloquial term for a romance scammer. The Sakawa Boys are a sprawling underground community of mostly young men, involved in various scamming activities. There are some women that are part of this, but it's a massive network of young boys, a lot of them based in Ghana,

who work together to essentially create these multiple identities. And they specifically target victims in westernized, countries. Inside the Sakawa world, there's a belief that supernatural forces can help them succeed, that rituals can draw in victims and protect the scammer from consequences. Someone that's heavily involved in forging activities also may be heavily involved in witchcraft, in voodoo, and other dark spiritual activities. And a lot of it turns out to be based in Ghana, not Nigeria. There's loads of crazy PR about Nigeria.

You open up the headlines and you see all of that. So the assumption is that a majority of these networks must live and breathe there. But a very massive part of this podcast was spending time in Ghana. I am Nigerian by heritage, but I've spent a lot of time in Ghana just next door. And I never would have imagined that a network like Sakawa existed in Ghana. If you know what you're looking for, it's easy to see. The Sakawa boys flaunt their wealth and power on the streets of Akra in other Ghanaian cities. But there's something else driving it, because no one embarks on a career dreaming of becoming a scammer.

It's coming from desperation because you're in a country and a system where youth unemployment is skyrocketing, and you want to find means to make a living. It's actually a pretty good way of making a living. Romance scamming isn't a crime in Ghana, but it's still looked down on, and this is not a career that people like to shout about from the rooftops. It's not like a typical job that you see promoted in yellow pages. It's always through word of mouth. Turns out, scamming flies pretty easily under the radar. Some of these scammers are family men. Their family members think they work in construction. They've been doing this for nearly a decade. And there's never been a raised eyebrow. They're putting food.

Food on the table. Money's coming in all the time. There's never a concern. There's never an odd behavior. A lot of the scamming happens from internet cafes, partly because it's rare for a young Ghanaian to have a whole computer set up at home. But also, it's just good cover.

What job doesn't involve having a computer? Very little. So that's how you're able to kind of mask that. Hannah's reporting took her to some internet cafes, and it didn't take long for her to find some people who were involved. One rainy afternoon, she and her producer just walked into one cafe

in Accra. We literally saw within five minutes of being there, two boys probably aged between 16 to 19 on a dating website. Their profile was of a white European brunette women, and you could see the men

that they're speaking to older middle-aged men from one of these targets. countries. Just two young boys in the middle of their workday, because this really is a job. That's how they treat it. You think you're in this kind of high-stakes glamorous or like at least sort of, I don't know, shady underworld, but also it's just like a lot of administrative tasks and spreadsheets. Some actually describe the victims of romance forward as clients because it puts them in that mindset of this is my job, this is my client. It's a job with training. Knowledge passed through

this informal group of highly trained catfishers. You could find yourself in a network that comes with a Sakawa handbook, a literal guide on how to be the best of the best romance scammer. There's a pretty widely held perception that victims of romance scams are rubs, lonely losers. But this isn't fair. People of all kinds fall for these scams for many reasons. And one of those reasons is that the people behind the images, know exactly what people are looking for, how to turn the screw. It's an approach that Vanessa herself, the real woman behind the Janessa photos, understands well.

In fact, it was her whole business plan when she, too, was openly wooing men to send her money online. The incredible skill that Vanessa, the real person, the cam girl, had in her sex work, is this sort of psychological manipulation. And she's really good at breadcrumming the men who are sitting across from her on screen and giving them just exactly what they want and mirroring back to them their deepest needs and desires, even anticipating what they want and reading them. Here's how she explained it to the love Genesea team. They get hooked and they get like, oh, shoots, I really like that. I didn't even know I liked that.

I do. I know you like something before you actually like it because I read and research. I read endless books on psychology, hypnotism, and how to manipulate their minds, but not in a bad way. That's what they're there for. So let's play. You win their hearts. You win their wallets. And the rest is history.

All of these techniques, all of these tools are the same ones that the scammers use, right? That's exactly what this person on the other end of the line with Simon was doing, was saying, Oh, thank you so much. You found me. I am broken. I do need you to patch me up. Can you just wire this money to this hotel in Toronto where I'm holed up right now? The people on the other end of those catfishing schemes, the ones holding the rods, they understand this intuitively.

They are or have become master manipulators. They're really good, these guys. They will meet the need. You know, they will meet the void. They'll slip in there and take the shape. required to get what they want. Victims will quite naturally often push for face-to-face communications, but the scammers have a strategy for this.

Can we just hop on a call? Can we just talk? Oh, my phone is broken. Oh, my carrier cut me off. Oh, this happened, that happened. Or the victim might set up a Zoom with the person, and then they just won't show. And then the scammer will say, well, no, I was there. You weren't there. It just goes on and on. There are some clients that aren't too fuss about seeing them because to them pictures are enough. Some of these people may not also be technologically savvy. So texting and speaking on the phone occasionally is fine for them as well.

Because you've also got to bear in mind a lot of the people that they target are much older. So because of that, that means that they're not using technology in a way that young people would. But no one is actually safe, because the Sakawa boys are definitely keeping up with the latest technology. One of the Sakawa Boys we interviewed said that they have recording devices that can turn a male voice into a female voice. So they will have these long, very intimate, often sexual conversations. And I love this as a podcaster that so many of these guys talked about these long conversations, these audio experiences, because audio, as we all know, is the most interesting. intimate medium of all, right? The voice is literally in your body.

You're in the dark with your headphones and this other person is right inside of you. It was more than three years ago when Katrina and Hannah reported this story. In that relatively short time, artificial intelligence has completely transformed online truth. A scammer today can probably map

Janessa's image onto his own face and become her in a video. You really can't even trust your eyes anymore. Combine that with the ever-evolve-evolve-allel skill of the catfishers, and, well, this isn't an industry that's going to be stomped out anytime soon. These scams all follow a pattern. It's a long game. The young man in Ghana described it as a courtship like any other, that essentially the first months are building up trust, that there's a little bit of love bombing.

Birthdays, anniversaries, selling them things, knowing that it's not on the first conversation that you get your payout, you have to build a relationship if they're questioning why they haven't seen you on video called in the months that you've been speaking. There is a response for everything. It may mean speaking to them throughout the day every day. Some may take turns, probably send them a profile of, okay, this is the client, this is everything you used to know about them, this is things that they like, this is how they like to be spoken to, remember this about their mom, they have a test coming up. So it can absolutely be a combination of one-to-one work or group work, meaning that you're splitting the earnings. The multitasking skills are out of this world. Some of them could be

speaking to up to a dozen people in the space of a month, 12 people, 12 different conversations, 12 bits of information to remember names, family members, the job that they do. And whilst I'm warming up that person slash client, I'm working on the next person. People's alarm bells aren't going off right away. And then once that groundwork has firmly established, then they'll say, oh, you know, actually, I just lost my phone. There's some elaborate reason that they can't access their funds. And a lot of times, if it's women being scammed, the men will be traveling or they'll be in the military. And they'll say that they are doing top secret work, and because of that work, they're not able to access their bank accounts.

So it's a kind of slow drip, right? 100 here, 200 there, nothing that might set off alarms. The really big scams will come much farther down the road. But usually it is about care in some way. Like, it will be some kind of personal crisis the way you would lean on anyone that you loved if you were in a moment of financial crisis. And you said, this is terrible, and I don't want to do this, but I really need this $10,000 because X, Y, Z. The real gut punch in the Love Genessa podcast is an Italian farmer who has taken for nearly a quarter million dollars by a scammer using Genessa photos.

That was one person. I mean, yeah, 250,000 euros. Roberto, he's a young Italian stallion, as I nicknamed him. Around my age, I'm in my only 30s, so is he. It's not an old person with, you know, dozens of cats at home and widowed. He was, I guess, quite busy running the several farms that he did in beautiful Sardinia. I think his point of weakness, his vulnerability was his romantic nature. Like, he was just a giant open heart walking around this planet. just ready to be squashed.

And they had built a virtual relationship for just over five years. He fell in love, like really and truly in love. And at one point he sent her a plane ticket to come to see him in Italy and went to the airport and saw a dark-haired woman getting off the plane and tried to follow her. and thought it was her and thought she got in a cab and left and was convinced that she had been there. Like he had told himself this story that she had come but rejected him. It was this really incredible kind of mind trick. The romantic mind is powerful.

It creates massive blind spots. This is the love of my life. Why would I not give them a few hundred? Why would I not give them a few thousand? Why would I not give them tens of thousands? So it's a love trap filled with love. Love bombing filled with a really intelligent system that's operating on a 24-hour kind of schedule that turns into a relationship where the payouts for the perpetrator is sweet because it's money.

Anyone who's been in a bad relationship or who fell in love with someone who never truly paid that love back understands this on some level. But what's incredible, I think, is that people will see these gaps. And victims will notice that things aren't lining up or that their lover has wrong information about them or is conveying something that's not true. And they'll give them a free pass, right? Like we talked to a psychologist about this and like, why does it take so long for the red flags? And she said, well, it's like sunk costs. The stories that we tell ourselves are so they can just eclipse all logic.

And we become very irrational in the face of love. The scammers know that and they exploit those holes. When we finally met Vanessa and asked her, we had many, many questions to ask her, and one of which was like, did you actually go to Sardinia? And she said, I've never been outside of the United States and Brazil, the only two places I've ever traveled. And even to the point where when we finally got them together, which is the final episode of the show, even then it was almost like he couldn't fathom that she truly hadn't been the human at the center of. this chaos in his life. I think he really thought that he had been scammed

by Genessa Brazil. Obviously, the Sakawa boys aren't just using Janessa's photos, but a lot of them were, still are. Probably will be for years and years. We asked her that, like, why do you think you're the one

that's so iterated? And she said, I can be anything. She's Brazilian, but she says people think she's Italian, people think she's Greek. She's this kind of global look for global scams. It's just the image took on a life of its own. It's a life that had serious implications for the real Vanessa. She became a victim, like Simon, Roberto, and thousands of others.

And Vanessa herself, she said she never even fought to go to the police because what she told us was that she assumed they would just say, You're a porn star. You brought this on yourself. Anyone can be a target. I think the more that you share, the more that you naturally have that risk for someone to duplicate images of you and pretend to be you.

And I've seen it even on a smaller scale of friends that I have on Instagram. Could have a few odd hundreds, maybe a thousand followers, and someone has gone on their profile. Hannah met several of the Sakawa boys who used Vanessa's photos impressed them on their motivations and feelings.

One boy definitely feels bad about what he did, although it's not clear cut either. You could tell he's a family man, he's got a wife and kids. He said that he did feel bad, but the game is the game, got to keep it going. You could see that he had some remorse. Others saw their culpability very differently. Young man, quite outgoing, but very low-key,

no remorse. He sees it as reparations. He makes the link of Ghana being the first African nation to break free from colonial rule and the fact that they were colonized from many of these countries that these romance scammers often target. There's no remorse because we're taking back what was taken from us. So I don't know if it's something that they do to make their conscience feel better about these crimes essentially that they've committed,

that have literally ruined lives. But I can imagine that that's probably something that's also widely spoken about in the networks to encourage people to say, look, don't fall back their ancestors sold from us, so it's time for us to get back what's ours. There's no concerted effort to crack down on the gangs. The laws, when there are any, aren't enforced.

The industry of romance scamming and fraud is continuing to thrive. can be very hard in overpopulated countries where there are already so many other economical issues at hand. Not to mention unstable, unpredictable governance, and the fact that these countries have far more critical problems to solve. It will probably be at the absolute bottom of the list to prioritize something like this,

where there's already issues like infrastructure, poverty, unemployment, water sanitation, sustainability, the list goes on. So with that instability, people found stability in romance scamming or scamming in general. And I think the more that technology and the internet improved, it just made it more attainable for people to keep on doing. I mean, no one is born bad, no one is born evil, no one is born with, you know, the intention to steal from others. But that is the result for many people when they just can't see a way. out in a system that's repetitively failing them. Hannah is clear about the aims of the Love Genessa podcast.

It's raising awareness about the dangers of romance scamming, the lives that it ruins, and the importance of how careful we have to be when pursuing anything romantic or not online. But I think it's right that the final thought should go to people like Simon and Roberto, who fell in love with a lie and saw their lives ripped apart long before the inevitable, embarrassing, crushing moment of realization. Some had medical conditions.

Some were already not in a great place with their family. They were mentally in the space where they're preparing to spend the rest of their lives of someone. So it was a gradual deterioration of their lives. I mean, viewed through that lens, the takeaway here isn't all that bad. Love can make you imagine things, but then oddly is quite warming and surprising

to know how many human beings are willing to wear their heart on their sleeve like that. Our ability to love is our greatest strength as a species, but it's our greatest vulnerability too. It's something we all have, something that connects us, something that catfishers exploit. Still, it's never a bad thing to be reminded of our capacity to let people in, to believe. Because if we don't, we'll all be alone.

We're all humans and we all absolutely make mistakes, and it's been great spending time of those people. And I just found it very fascinating how our digital lives are so manipulated by our very human, very animal psychology. We can't stop being human. Camelion is a production of Campside Media and AudioChuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean, and was written and reported by me and Joe Barrett.

It was produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Simenhoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimack. Theme by Ewan Lightram Ewan and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregor Doriatis, Matt Cher, and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today,

please rate, follow, and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. And if you have any feedback tips or story ideas, you can email us at CamelionPod at campsidemedia.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next week. I think Chuck would approve.