She thought she’d found love on Instagram. He asked for $7,000. Then he disappeared. A raw story of catfishing, romance scams, and the people who survive them.

The Username That Wasn’t Real

An Encounter at the Coffee Shop

The coffee shop is half-empty, which is how I prefer them. She’s sitting at the corner table, the one with the outlet hidden beneath the shelf, the one where people sit when they want to be seen but not disturbed. She looks like she’s been here for hours. The same cup of untouched latte, a napkin she’s folded into increasingly small squares, the particular stillness of someone who doesn’t know what to do with their hands.

I’ve been watching her for twenty minutes. Not in a creepy way—in the way you watch someone who’s broadcasting something into the universe and hoping someone will notice. She wants to be noticed. She wants someone to ask her what’s wrong. And there’s something wrong. Something that looks like grief but moves like shame.

I approach. It’s what I do.

“This seat taken?” I ask.

She looks up. Her eyes are red-rimmed but dry, the tears already cried, the well running empty. She shakes her head. I sit.

“I’m not really in the mood for company,” she says.

“Neither am I,” I say. “So we’ll just sit here. Together. Not talking. That’s fine.”

She almost smiles. It’s the kind of almost-smile that means thank you for not pretending.

Five minutes pass. Then ten. The coffee shop fills slightly, empties again. The afternoon light shifts from gold to amber to the particular gray of a winter evening in the Midwest.

“I was scammed,” she says finally. Not looking at me. Looking at the napkin, now folded into something too small to fold anymore.

“I know,” I say.

“You don’t know.”

“You’re right. I don’t.” I take a breath. “But I can listen. If you want.”

She looks at me. Really looks. Assessing. Deciding.

Her name is Caroline. She’s twenty-six years old. She works as a veterinary technician in a small city in Ohio, a job she loves because it involves animals, which are simpler than people. She lives alone in an apartment she can barely afford. She has a cat named Biscuit who is, as she puts it, “the only male in my life who’s never let me down.”

She tells me this last part with a laugh that catches in her throat.

“Seven weeks,” she says. “Seven weeks, and I thought I had found something real.”

I wait. The coffee shop has emptied again. The barista is wiping down the counter, preparing to close. The amber light has gone gray.

“He found me on Instagram,” she says. “That’s the thing. I know it sounds stupid. I know everyone says they met on Instagram and everyone rolls their eyes. But it wasn’t like that. It felt—” She stops. Starts again. “It felt like fate.”

She shows me her phone. The Instagram profile. A man named Daniel, mid-thirties, handsome in a clean-cut way. Engineer, according to his bio. Divorced, widowed—he told her both at different times, and she didn’t question it because she was too busy falling in love with his messages. His photos showed him traveling, working, living. A life. A real life.

“He commented on my post,” she says. “I posted a picture of Biscuit, and he wrote something like ‘Your cat is adorable. I can tell you’re someone who takes care of the things they love.'”

The message was simple. Warm. Not flirty, exactly. Just… kind.

“I checked his profile,” she says. “And his life looked so put together. He had all these photos from places he’d traveled. He had a dog—a golden retriever named Max, who was just the sweetest. And he wrote these captions that were thoughtful, you know? Not like most guys who just post selfies. He wrote like he had things to say.”

She swipes to show me their first conversation. It started simply, innocuously. A question about Biscuit. A follow-up question about her day. A comment about the weather in Ohio versus wherever he was (California, he said, but later it was Texas, and later still it was back in California, and she didn’t notice because she was too busy feeling special).

“The first week was just talking,” she says. “Like, actual talking. Not flirty banter. He asked about my job, my family, my childhood. He remembered things I told him. He asked follow-up questions. It felt like—” She pauses. “It felt like being seen. Like someone was actually paying attention to who I was.”

I know what she means. I’ve felt it too, at different points in my life. The intoxication of being truly seen by another person. How it can make you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do.

“He told me about his marriage,” she says. “His wife had died. Cancer. Two years ago. And he was still grieving, but he was ready to move on. He said he wasn’t looking for anything serious, but then he kept talking to me, and something changed. He said something changed.”

The term for this is love bombing. I don’t say that. Not yet. I let her tell the story.

“He started calling me beautiful,” she says. “At first it felt like too much. I told him he was moving too fast. And he apologized—actually apologized. He said he couldn’t help how he felt. He said he’d never met anyone like me. He said I made him believe in love again.”

She pauses. Her hands are shaking slightly.

“I should have run,” she says. “I know that now. But back then, I thought it was romantic. I thought he was just… passionate. I thought I’d finally found someone who loved as hard as I wanted to love.”

The barista announces they’re closing in ten minutes. Neither of us moves.

“How much?” I ask.

She blinks. “How much what?”

” money. How much did you send?”

She looks at the table. At the napkin, now a tiny square, too small to fold any further.

“Seven thousand dollars,” she says. “Over the course of four weeks. In increments. Some were five hundred. Some were a thousand. One was twenty-five hundred.”

“What were the reasons?”

She takes a breath. The breath of someone who has told this story before, to other people, and is tired of telling it, but needs to tell it again.

“The first time, it was his wallet. He said he was traveling for work—some project in another state—and his wallet was stolen. He needed money for a hotel, for food, to get home. He promised to pay me back as soon as he got home. He sent me photos of his hotel room, of the city he was in, of Max the dog at home alone and he missed him so much.”

She pauses.

“I sent the money. Five hundred dollars. And he called me crying. He said I had saved him. He said no one had ever done anything like that for him. He said he loved me.”

The coffee shop is dark now, except for the lights we didn’t notice dimming. The barista has gone to the back. We’re alone.

“The second time,” she continues, “it was his mother. She was sick. In the hospital. He needed money for the flight home, for the hospital bills, for everything. He sent me photos of flowers he was going to send her, of the hospital corridor, of his face in the mirror looking devastated.”

Another pause. Longer.

“I sent two thousand dollars.”

She says it like she’s confessing a crime. Like she’s admitting to something she can’t take back.

“The third time, it was his business. He was supposed to close on a deal—a big contract that would change everything. But there were fees, taxes, unexpected expenses. If he could just get through this one hurdle, everything would be fine. He’d pay me back tenfold. He’d take me on vacation. He’d introduce me to his family.”

Caroline’s voice is flat now. The tears have stopped. There’s something else there. Something harder.

“I sent twenty-five hundred dollars. And then—” She stops. “And then he stopped answering.”

I know how this story ends. I’ve read about it, studied it, talked to people who’ve lived it. But I let her tell it. This is her story to tell.

“He didn’t block me right away,” she says. “He just… stopped. Messages went unread. Calls went to voicemail. The Instagram profile was still there, but the last post was from three weeks ago, and he wasn’t responding to anything.”

She laughs. The dry, hollow laugh of someone who’s processed the worst and come out the other side.

“I kept messaging. Like an idiot. I kept saying ‘are you okay?’ and ‘I’m worried about you’ and ‘please just let me know you’re alive.’ And then, after two weeks of that—” She stops. Swallows. “The profile was deleted. The phone number was disconnected. And I realized that none of it was real. None of it.”

“What was the worst part?” I ask.

She looks at me. The question catches her off-guard.

“The worst part isn’t the money,” I say. “The money is gone. The worst part is something else. What is it?”

She’s quiet for a long time. The coffee shop is fully dark now. The streetlights outside cast shadows through the window.

“The worst part,” she says slowly, “is that I really loved him. I know that’s pathetic. I know I was naive. I know I should have seen it coming. But I loved him. Or I loved the idea of him. Or I loved who he pretended to be. And that person—” Her voice cracks. “That person never existed. He was a fiction. He was a story I told myself so that I could believe someone could love me like that.”

Here’s what I know about romance scams. They’re not about money, not really. They’re about longing. The scammers understand something profound about human psychology: that lonely people will do extraordinary things for connection. That the promise of love can make rational people irrational, generous people gullible, careful people careless. They exploit the deepest human need—the need to be seen, to be chosen, to matter to someone.

Caroline is a smart woman. I can tell. She’s also a lonely woman, in the specific way that many people in their twenties are lonely—surrounded by possibility but unable to access it, wanting connection but afraid to reach for it. The scammer knew this. The scammer counted on it.

“The thing I keep asking myself,” Caroline says, “is why me? Why did he pick me? What did I do to make him think I would fall for it?”

“You didn’t do anything,” I say. “He picked you because you were available. Because you were kind. Because you responded. That’s not a flaw. That’s who you are.”

“But I was so stupid—”

“You were hopeful. Those are different things.”

She looks at me. The tears have started again, but differently now. Not the empty tears of grief. The cleansing tears of recognition.

“The money I sent,” she says. “It was money I didn’t have. I put it on credit cards. Two of the transfers were from loans I took out. I told myself I was helping someone I loved. I told myself it would all work out.”

She laughs. That hollow laugh again.

“I’m still paying for it. The minimum payments. The interest. It’s like a monthly reminder that I was stupid. That I was tricked. That I wanted something so badly that I ignored every warning sign.”

She’s not alone. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Americans lost over 1.3billiontoromancescamsin2023alone.Theaveragevictimlosesaround4,400. But the emotional toll—the sense of shame, the loss of trust, the difficulty of believing anyone again—that’s incalculable.

“Do you know what the saddest part is?” she asks.

“Tell me.”

“The saddest part is that I’ll probably do it again. Not with another scammer. But with another person. I’ll probably fall too fast again. I’ll probably ignore the warning signs again. Because I want to believe. I want to believe that someone can love me like that. And no matter how much this hurts, I don’t want to stop believing.”

I don’t tell her that’s not true. I don’t tell her she’s learned her lesson and she’ll be careful now. Because that’s not how hope works. Hope isn’t cured by disappointment. Hope is fed by it. Hope grows in the cracks of our cynicism, and no amount of pain kills it completely.

The coffee shop is closed. The barista has come out twice, politely asking us. We’ve stayed both times.

“I should go,” Caroline says. She gathers her things. Her phone, her keys, her small world of worries.

“Before you do,” I say, “I want to tell you something.”

She waits.

“The person you loved,” I say. “The one who didn’t exist. He wasn’t a fiction entirely. He was a combination of things you saw in yourself—your generosity, your capacity for love, your willingness to risk. He just reflected them back at you. And those things are real. Those things are still inside you. And one day, someone will see them and love you for them. For real. Not for the money you can send. For the person you are.”

She nods. A small nod. Not quite believing, but willing to consider.

Before You Go

I want to ask you something.

Not because I want an answer. Not because I’m keeping score. But because this conversation isn’t complete until you step into it.

Think about the last time you wanted something so badly that you ignored a warning sign. Maybe it was a relationship. Maybe it was a job. Maybe it was a opportunity that seemed too good to be true, and you told yourself it wasn’t, because you needed it to be true.

Now ask yourself: What did you gain by ignoring it? What did you lose? And would you do it again?

And then—

Your Invitation

Tell someone the truth tonight.

Not the partial truth. Not the version that makes you look good. The real truth. The one you’ve been hiding because you’re ashamed. The one about the time you were tricked, or used, or made a fool of. The one that makes you feel stupid when you think about it.

Tell a friend. Tell your mother. Tell a stranger on the internet. Tell someone who will listen without judgment, because the shame of being tricked only exists in silence. The moment you say it out loud—”I was scammed” or “I was used” or “I was a fool for someone who didn’t deserve it”—the power of it diminishes.

You are not your worst moment. You are not the money you lost or the love you didn’t receive or the trust that was broken. You are the person who loved anyway, who hoped anyway, who reached out anyway.

And that person—the one who was brave enough to try—deserves compassion, not shame.

So tell someone. Tonight. And carry on with your day.

And tomorrow, maybe tell someone else. Maybe make it a habit—the way Caroline is going to make it a habit, the way millions of people who have been scammed are learning to make it a habit. Because silence is what gives shame its power. And speaking is what takes it away.

The story doesn’t have to define you. But it does have to be told.

And that’s worth the risk.

The coffee shop has closed. The barista has gone home. Caroline has gone home, to her apartment and her cat and her life that is still her life, even though it feels like someone else’s now. She’ll pay the credit card bills. She’ll go to work at the veterinary clinic. She’ll learn to trust again, slowly, painfully, the way we all learn to trust again.

And somewhere, in a city she’s never seen, someone is setting up another profile. Another face that isn’t theirs. Another story that isn’t true. Another person who wants something real and is about to get a fiction.

But fiction isn’t forever. Truth is. And the truth is that Caroline survived. That she will survive. That you will survive too.

See you at the next intersection.