Reply All - #13 Love is Lies

Episode Date: February 15, 2015

A woman starts dating again at 60 after her marriage falls apart. We follow her into a world of millionaire import/export moguls and fifteen-year old internet scammers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dallas met her husband in 1978 when she was 24 years old. He was the head of the local frisbee club, and she loved Ultimate Frisbee. They got married, they had kids, they turned 60 together. And then this past September, he had a mild stroke. As they were getting ready to leave for the hospital, Dallas saw a text show up on his phone. I hope you're enjoying this nice fall day. I wish we were biking together. She didn't know who the text was from, but it didn't really worry her. They were both serious bike people.

spent a month that year biking the Pacific Coast, and her husband rode to work every day. So it wasn't suspicious that he might have a friend who he commuted with. But days later, when they were back at home, she found herself still wondering about that text. Who was this person? I decided to grab his phone, and I kept scrolling back on the phone and realized that he was texting her from the hospital and said, the doctor told me I can't exercise for a month. and she wrote back and said, is love making aerobic.

So then I kept scrolling back and I realized who it was. She was an old friend of mine. I just felt all alone. My heart started racing and I was out in my studio at the time and I came back towards the house and he was outside at the time just sitting on a chair

and he said in the very sing-songy way, what's you doing? Oh, no. And I wanted to say, I'm about to ruin your life. But I just said, oh, nothing. I just had some work to do in the studio. And I couldn't even say anything to him on that day because all our boys, we have three boys. All the boys and their girlfriends or wife was coming out because they hadn't seen him since he had his stroke.

So all day long, I had to pretend like nothing was going on. And when they left, I confronted him. and I said, today my life changed forever, and you must move out. Which is how Dallas found herself 60 years old and dating again. The last time she'd started her relationship, three decades earlier, it had started with a date in a park tossing a frisbee. Her next date would be with a very different kind of guy, a wealthy, globe-trotting orphan.

From Gimlet, this is a reply all, the show about the internet, that I'm PJ Vote. Dallas set up a profile on Match.com. She wanted to find somebody who liked being as active as she did. She worried that that number, 60, would turn some of those people away. That sends me a wink or a flirt or something. I say, don't let 60 scare you because I have the energy for two 30-year-olds. It was fun, flirting, checking out guys again, and there was the rush of getting new messages. But Dallas quickly learned what everybody learns when they online date. People are not as interesting as you want them to be. In fact, judging from their photos,

most of the guys were pretty much the same. I cannot tell you how many men hold up fish. Wait, they hold up fish like this is a fish that I caught? Yes, yes. And I have a whole, whenever I see one, I copy and paste because I have a whole folder now of men who hold up fish. I probably have 20 of them so far, probably more. One held up a shark.

One actually held up a turtle. But I don't care how big your fish is or how little your fish is. I'm not interested in your fish. I'm interested in your face or your body. But then Dallas did meet somebody she was interested in. Dennis Beersford. He had a nice of the hair.

He was thin. He did not look 59. In fact, the second photo he sent, I said, oh, my God, you don't look 59. You look like you're, you know, 38. And you had a great smile, you know, teeth and everything. He looked happy, you know, really happy. He messaged her first.

Soon they were emailing, learning about each other. Dennis lived 50 minutes away, but he traveled constantly for work, an import-export business that made him a lot of money but also took up all his time. And he was finishing his last job before early retirement. He'd fly to China one day, the Philippines another. He was so busy that they couldn't even make time for a first date. But they talked a lot. When he had a spare moment, he'd send her an email or call her from one of his far-flying

destinations. And he found other ways to stay in touch. He sent me flowers, which, you know, I hadn't gotten flowers before. And it was, it was awesome. You know, I feel good about that. Oh, and he would sing to me too. Really? Yeah. Yeah, he didn't have that great of a voice, but, you know, he sang, and it made, he was really, he sounded really happy. You know, he'd sing me the song and, oh, what's his name? Ed, Ed Sheeran, I will love you under the light of a thousand stars, something like that. And, you know, he said those words.

He said, I love those words. And I think of you. Dallas said her husband never complimented her. He'd never once given her flowers. And after she'd kicked him out, she'd found these emails on his computer. There was more than one woman. And it wasn't just that he'd cheated with multiple women. It was that he'd been loving to them.

in a way he'd never been with her. Seeing in the emails that he sent flowers and all the compliments he paid to both these women, that's what really hurt me. And I think that I went looking, maybe looking for a guy who would pay me those compliments. You know, everybody wants that. She found herself looking forward to Dennis' phone calls from the road,

even if sometimes they would come at two or three in the morning. It didn't matter. She was falling for him. This 59-year-old guy who hopped around the world but still found the time to sing off-key love songs to her. There was one point where I was driving in the country. It was about six in the evening and it was dark and the moon was coming up

and it was just this bright, orange, beautiful, huge moon. And I pulled over and I sent him a text and I said, you have to go outside right now to see the moon. It's so beautiful. And I wrote to him the next day, and I said, you know, it kind of surprised me how fast I thought of you, because that was the first thing I thought of. So then I knew, well, something's happening here, you know, to me. Dennis was making Dallas feel like a teenager in love. But of course, when you're not an actual teenager, falling in love is different.

You know the many ways that people can let you down. You know what to look for. And there were fishy things about Dennis that Dallas just couldn't ignore. He said he'd grown up in England and then moved to Chile, but somehow he had a vaguely German accent. And sometimes when he'd respond to her emails, his responses would seem random, like non-sequiturs. Also, he claimed to be an orphan,

which is what every con man in every movie claims to be. And the biggest red flag was after five weeks of talking, they still hadn't met in person. He always had an excuse. When her friends told her that he sounded suspicious, she had to agree that they had a point. But what gave her hope was that in five weeks, he'd never asked her for money. Every day we would talk, I'd go, okay, he didn't ask for money.

That's good. That's good. He didn't ask for money. And then, finally, one morning, it just all came down. Dennis was in the Philippines. He called to say that there'd been an accident, and one of his workers had died. If he wanted to get his exports out of the country, he'd have to pay $150,000 to a customs agent. He said, you know, I've raised a lot of the money. And I thought, okay, here it comes, here it comes. And finally, he said, you know, I've raised 140,000 of it. And he said, I just need 10,000 more.

And he asked me for $10,000. And I said, I don't have it. And anyway, I wouldn't give $10,000 to someone I knew let alone someone I had never met. And then he turned, he started to turn mean. How did you feel when he asked you for the money? Really disappointed because I knew that this feeling that I had this whole entire time, you know, when I really looked forward to his emails or the songs he was sending or, you know, the e-cars,

that all that was over. And it made me really sad. More sad than angry. And also, increasingly, she just felt curious. If Dennis wasn't Dennis, who was he? Was he a he a them? You know, I really would like to know more about this, this whole operation and how they work.

And what goes on? Like, is this your business? Are you in a ring? Do you work for a corporation? or are you in love with someone? Do you have a family? Are you supporting them? I almost wanted to call him back and say,

okay, forget about me being Dallas and, you know, you trying to scam me and all this. I just want to know. I mean, I just wanted to know so much. Coming up after the break, we try to answer some of those questions by talking to somebody who's an expert on the kinds of scams that Dallas encountered.

A guy used to run them himself. So we wanted to try to answer some of Dallas's questions for her. We tried to reach Dennis, and we had no luck. But we were able to learn about the world he operates in. For starters, obviously, Dallas isn't alone in having this kind of experience. Thousands of people in the U.S. report being victims of this kind of crime every year. And women over 50 are the most likely to be targeted. They typically lose thousands of dollars before figuring it out,

and there's at least one case where a woman lost over half a million dollars. The scammers are often working in West Africa or former Soviet republics, but they can be anywhere. And while we couldn't find Dennis, we were able to talk to somebody who used to run the kinds of scams that Dallas suspects Dennis was running. The guy we found asked us not to use his real name.

I'll call him Charlie. He also didn't want us to narrow down where he lives too specifically. It's a country in Africa. We spoke to him on a cell phone there, so the audio quality is not great. And to be clear, this is not the guy who scammed Dallas.

But we wanted to know why a scammer like Dennis would have picked a target like Dallas. How would they have picked her? Like, how would they decide who they were going to message? They don't pick. It's a random thing. They go online, create a match account or e-harmonial, one of those dating sites, and then they just search.

Scammers do what anybody who's online dating does. They create categories, and they start to filter people. It gives you preference. Like, single income, marital status, someone who's involved, someone who's a widow, someone who's separated. Those are the three main things we look for. And age two. They go, they search for someone who's older. She ended up talking to somebody on the phone, and she said the guy had an accent that to her sounded like a German accent.

What do you think of that? They can fake accents. Charlie says it can be one person who's pretending to be a lot of different people. They can chat you as a German. They can chat you as an Englishman. Like a German, an English person, it's just one person. So it might be someone who has been to Germany before or someone who's actually German. Charlie said it could work like this.

You spent a week messaging a ton of people. By Wednesday, a lot of them would have stopped responding. But the ones who stuck around on Friday, they were your clients. And you had to make your clients fall in love with you. Some scanners would work in teams where, you know, two guys might have to write text and emails. A third guy might be the closer who would handle the phone calls and ask for money. And a lot of these scammers were really young, teenagers, which can sometimes show. When Charlie first started, he says he made a lot of rookie mistakes.

and in his professional opinion, Dallas's scammer was a rookie too. For example, Dallas said that when Dennis tried to initiate the scam, one part involved putting her on the phone with the alleged customs agent, who needed her money. Dallas talked to that alleged agent for a bit, and when she hung up, Dennis called her back. And he says, what did he say? And I said, I just blurted out, well, he sounded a lot like you.

And then Dennis says, oh, there's something I have to do right now, and he hangs up. So obviously he was flustered because this was not coming down like he thought it should. Charlie agreed, saying probably this guy was flustered. He was probably somebody who hadn't run that many scams before. And Dennis probably thought that his customs agent accent was just better than it really was. Another rookie mistake, says Charlie, were those email replies Dennis sometimes sent, which seemed like non-sequiters.

Back when Charlie scammed, he never would have sent an email like that. My email on time, on point. Everything he sent, he said, was on point. To make it feel like he was there with the person. It felt like I was there with that. Like, I can hear the pride in your voice. Like, it sounds like it was important to you to be a good boyfriend to these people, even though it was... Yeah, like, that's what I'm saying.

Like, it was deep. It's like going undercover. You get lost in it. You wake up first and that's what's on your mind. Who to call, who to emails, stuff like that. Charlie worked from an internet cafe, which was open 24 hours. He said 98% of the other people there were also scammers. People worked for themselves, but they were happy if someone else succeeded.

Succeed meaning actually convinced a rich European or a rich American to wire them money. When someone's party. What are the parties like? It depends on how much money the person got. You get some throw parties like it's DDE hosting a party or $50 in a party. If you didn't catch that, he said that people throw parties like P. Diddy, or 50 cent. At these parties, people would actually throw money in the air. Like when you go to a strip club and you're throwing money,

instead of throwing $1, you're throwing like $100 in the strip club. Not even $0.50 can do that. Do you remember the biggest one you ever went to? I actually think to just one. It was a birthday at a Chinese restaurant, so those are food and drinks. So it was pretty low-key. Charlie and his friends had heard stories about scammer parties with rap video levels of excess, but he'd never been to one himself.

He'd also seen people driving Ferraris and Bentley's in town with money that they said they got from scams. But then he'd also heard rumors that actually those were just drug dealers, claiming that they'd earned their money through internet scamming. In any case, Charlie told me that he didn't scam to get rich. In the place he grew up, he was middle class. He didn't need to worry about feeding his family. He was 15.

His family was feeding him. When he got his first score, $200, he spent the way a lot of American teenagers would spend $200 free bucks. He took his friends out to Mr. Biggs, which was the expensive fast food restaurant. We just bought everything they had. They had burgers. Pizza. Pizza.

Fried rice. Pies. Pyes. And the money didn't last very long. I think the money was over in about a day. Do you ever miss it? Do I was? Do you ever miss scamming?

No. I've seen people who had a shitload of money who was driving big-ass cars and now don't have shit and they come to me and ask me for like Long Island, so I never miss it. That money never lasts. It comes fast and it goes fast.

It doesn't laugh. I don't miss that shit, which I've hurting a lot of people. Why did you stop? I remember. one time I took money from a single woman when she had kids. I took money for me and I deceived her. The woman was a single mother with kids.

And Charlie said he deceived her, taking her money. After that, the way, like, the mail she sent to me, I was like, damn, I wouldn't want this to happen to my mother or my sister or my family or like anybody I know. One of those things, it just broke me down. And I was like, this shit just now works. It's causing people this much pain. Charlie says he called her and he apologized for what he'd done.

She didn't forgive him at first. She was still angry. But not because she couldn't get her money back. She was still angry because she still wanted to be with the character that Charlie had invented. Even after he told her that that person wasn't real. She was in love with the person or the person behind the voice. She knew it was a scam, but then she was trying to find out who the person was because she liked the person, how the person cared for her and all that.

Dallas isn't that far from that feeling herself. She knows that Dennis wasn't real, but she still has memories of him. And those memories feel real. When she hears one of the songs that Dennis used to sing to her, the memories come back. Songs remind me of that time, and now when I hear them, it's just like, oh, I almost feel like this real relationship is over, you know? And that's what's so strange to me. Even though I know it was fake, there's something in there that, oh, you know, it's kind of

sad that it's over. I asked Dallas if she thought that men in actual relationships could learn anything useful from scam artists. And she said absolutely. Be attentive, say nice things, even if you don't feel like it, send flowers. And Charlie agreed. He doesn't scam anymore, but he said that his year's scamming made him a better adult boyfriend.

I like that idea, even if it feels a little Pat or Ted talky, you know, what a scammer taught me about being in love. But talking to Charlie and Dallas, you realize that the most powerful thing that scammers do is just listen to the people they're talking to. I think that's what Dallas misses and why Charlie says he felt like he got lost in the role he was playing. Sitting on the phone while someone far away lies in their bed and talks about what their worries about their job are, their hopes for their kids, or just a pop song that's stuck in their head that week. You can fake your profile name and your picture and your height and your weight. You can lie about your intentions. But if you're trying to be

a good scammer or a good boyfriend, listening is the one thing that's hard to fake. Up until this week, the phone number that Dennis gave to Dallas still worked. We tried him again and again, listened to his outgoing voicemail message, this little tiny piece of this guy that still remained after he disappeared. This is Dennis. Leave a message. Thanks. We didn't know if the phone was even ringing somewhere,

or if he turned it off. But we finally left him a message, saying we were journalists and wanted to talk to him. And later that day, his outgoing voicemail message had disappeared. Which means Dennis may still be out there. Listening. Reply All is me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. We're also Chris Neary, Shruthy Pinnaminani, and Catherine Wells.

This episode was edited by Alex Bloomberg and Chris Neary, and it was mixed by the Reverend John DeLore. Matt Lieber is the smell of clean laundry. Special thanks this week to Sylvie Douglas and Kelly Prime. Our theme music and scoring were from Breakmaster Cylinder. Ad music was from Build Buildings. If you stumbled on to this episode, you can subscribe to the show at iTunes.com or Replyall.com or Replyall.com.

Thank you.