CHICAGO – A single mother in Chicago was swindled out of $85,000 by a scammer who posed as a Greek bachelor on a dating app after stringing her along for weeks with text messages and phone calls, according to an Oct. 5 story in the Daily Mail.
Christine Settingsgaard, 37, met a man on the dating app Hinge who went by the name of Mark Godfrey, a supposed architectural engineer from Greece. She quickly became infatuated by the widowed father-of-one who said he was working in the U.S. But in reality, the man was a scammer in Nigeria who duped her into trusting him with messages of love and affection.
Godfrey used pictures of an unidentified man with brown hair and a gleaming smile to trick Settingsgaard. But there’s no evidence to suggest that the man in the photos is in any way implicated in the scam perpetrated against Settingsgaard, who is a successful executive.
The scammer eventually tricked her out of $85,000 by forwarding a check for that amount to Settingsgaard, then asking her to wire the cash to his sibling. But she fell victim to a quirk which often sees banks make the cash available to the recipient of the check before it has cleared.
That meant Mark’s sister “Kelsey” was able to withdraw the cash before the check bounced, meaning Settingsgaard had lost her life savings.
After the incident, she faced losing her home until the Chicago Tribune reported the story and her bank returned $82,000.
Settingsgaard said the ordeal nearly left her penniless, if it weren’t for friends, neighbors and her parents, who helped her pay for her groceries and mortgage. “My six-year-old son wanted to go to football camp this summer, and the most heartbreaking thing was having to tell him he can’t go to the camp because I got scammed,” she said.
He even claimed to have written her a love poem that made her fall even harder for the online lover, but after the incident, she found the poem was lifted from a google search.
Settingsgaard said that after six weeks of talking, Mark asked her for help transferring some money to his sister and daughter, who he said lived in Utah.
He asked Settingsgaard to transfer his “sister,” Kelsey, $500 using Paypal. She promptly did so, and Mark paid the money back, further gaining her trust.
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