CONFESSIONS OF A SERIAL SCAMMER

The hunter was moving methodically in cyberspace, a terrain that had taken him the better part of a decade to traverse systematically eliminating his quarry, hampered only by the dips in his transmission speeds when his connections to the networks via browsers was congested with traffic and by his need to take a bathroom break . Sometimes, he barely made it to the bathroom and the angry stream of urine that gushed out violently at times startled him ,the stench of ammonia leaving him gagging but it also signalled he needed to hydrate and he would replenish himself quickly before returning to the hunt. It was exhausting work, sometimes he would develop tremors in his legs or worse, his behind!

Once he had been so engrossed in tracking his prey, he only realised he needed a break when he literally cramped his gluteus maximus. The pain excruciating pain registered 10 plus on his Richter scale of pain…the cramp searing his butt muscle that it felt like he was been mascerated there. The thought of it brought a wry smile that crinkled his mouth a little at the sides.

The world wide web was littered with the cadavers of the lovelorn men and women looking for love globally including the 50 plus individuals he personally had entrapped and nailed in more ways than one and he was hungry. His last quarry had escaped his carefully executed plan. She had outwitted him, caught him with his gigabytes down so to speak, speak with his meticulous attention to details, in fact he was a regular Walter Mitty his multi persona’s would have put Walter’s to shame as he could conjure up a personal profile that exuded enough allure that drew in these women like flies to a rotting carcass.

Love that four letter word, had served him well. In the name of love, he would text message them…using the word like a lure, it was the thing that made these women unable to resist the shiny offering he proffered. It was love that made one of his conquests become suicidal after he had enticed her into his trap…she fell for him big time in fact he cleaned up, the poor woman was so gullible, she spent her entire life savings to finance his many failed attempts at being an entrepreneur. She had even flown across continents to meet up with him only to realise that she had been duped. The only reason he wasn’t behind bars was that he had sent a stranger to meet her and he evaded the trap set by local authorities.

Time was of the essence as he clicked and trawled through familiar hunting grounds..social networking sites like Facebook, Badoo or the online dating sites that abounded within this virtual world. He marvelled at the rate he was able to manipulate his targets easily with a mere click of his mouse. He needed to work fast, for once entrapped the more likely he was able to exploit them for their vulnerabilities and hit them where it was lucrative, their heartstrings …loosening them up when in reality they should have never become entangled in his network of lies . A network supported by his agility to meticulously save all messages sent to him, emails or even record phone messages to him. He actually had a system he had concocted, a database he had created in Access…he was meticulous as an IRS auditor…stored every bit of information he could get off them.

It was amazing how he could loosen their tongues with promises he made, sometimes he could barely contain his laughter while speaking to them on the phone and he made it a rule never to call them once he had milked them dry. But he was like the villain in Othello, He likened himself to Iago...there was a reason he liked the manipulative bastard, he had realised from reading of him , the power of the spoken word…and he likened himself to his personality and more importantly Iago's ability to loosen their purse strings via MoneyGram and Western Union . More importantly these places enabled him to gather the various amounts that women send him without suspicion. The amounts were small enough not to raise scrutiny although one time he had managed to get a woman who thought he was exclusively hers from sending him $3000 via moneygram.

The worldwide web was his for the taking and his pickings were the women in their thousands from all walks of life, he had a smorgasbord of them to choose from and he likened the process as similar to going fishing and the bait was the picture that he added to his profile page. He knew how to manipulate the situation, once he had let the hook in, tantalise them a little with pictures that women found ‘ cute ‘ and repost them on his page or send them as an attachment … then it was just a matter of time before his words… in most cases he had found on websites on the net , aspiring love poets , whose works he plagiarised often that he reckoned , if he had had to pay for the images or pieces of texts, he ’d be bankrupt in no time.

Right now he was in the process of grooming his latest conquest. She was a retired accountant, married once, divorced, no children who lived by herself in her own home. He began by bombarding her mesenger inbox with pithy love notes which he had cut and pasted from various sites. She responded predictably and soon he was speaking to her on a mobile paid for by the woman. She had sent him the mobile after he send her a picture of a smashed i-phone and she believed him. Little did she know, that the phone she sent him was just one of the twenty i-phones he had gleaned from other women.

He knew that he was onto a goldmine. It was only a matter of hours before he uncovered the motherlode!