‘Hey.’
It was a Twitter DM. I quickly clicked on the display picture icon. It was a woman. Weird. I rarely receive DMs from women, let alone foreign women. She looked vaguely South American or Spanish. The picture was not really revealing; it just showed her from the chest up. Still, her beauty was undeniable. She reminded me of Shakira. Growing up, I loved Shakira. She was one of my favourite artists, and ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ was one of my favourite songs.
Already I felt a little bit special. Seen, even! It’s not like I had a large roster of girls to talk to anyway. This was a rare win in my social media life.
‘I’m Maria Suarez and I’ve loved some of your thoughts on your posts and I would like us to be friends?’
Oh, so she’s been stalking me? And she likes my vibe? I thought to myself, this is going better than expected.
For a few days we chatted on Twitter every now and again. Our talks revolved around trending topics. We exchanged posts we found interesting on the timeline and discussed them or even shared memes and had a good laugh about them. We finally exchanged numbers and our chats migrated to WhatsApp and that’s when the conversation got real.
Maria said she was from Bolivia and had been in the military for the better part of half a decade. It made sense to me as she was clueless about some of the TV shows that had come out during that period. One time, I told her she should watch Money Heist, which was a successful Netflix show. I thought she would have already seen it, but as she explained, being in the army meant she’d had no time for things like that. She even sent pictures of herself in her uniform, and boy oh boy she rocked that uniform really, really well.
Maria said she got a payout from her service in the military and wanted to share some gifts with me: an iPhone 14, a MacBook and 2,500 US dollars cash. I was so excited, but it felt like too much, too soon. Who gives all that to a stranger they just met online? But I accepted. The gifts were set to come on the following weekend. She would send them via DHL. But first she needed me to send 250 dollars to an account she was going to provide, to facilitate the shipping. I didn’t have that much money, but maybe I could ask for an advance on next month’s salary. Maria said the money was needed for one of the ‘agents’ who was in contact with DHL. She said she would have paid him already but it wasn’t possible to open sealed packages for ‘security reasons’. It didn’t fully make sense. But I was too excited about the gifts to question it and hoped my boss would accept my request for an advance.
Full of excitement, I went to tell my senior at work. I was doing an internship at a local pharmacy. I worked by the counter together with my senior Lionel, attending to clients. When customer traffic had slowed a bit, I told him my dilemma and asked him if it was wise to ask for an advance, given the situation. Lionel burst out laughing on hearing this, and he went on for minutes just giggling and shaking his head before he could pull himself together and give me his advice.
‘How can you be so naive? Young man, do you think this life is so easy that people are out there wanting to hand out money willy-nilly?’ He couldn’t help but laugh the whole time as he lectured me on how I was being duped.
Now it all started to make sense to me: all the kindness, all the friendliness was just to swindle me out of 250 dollars. Wow, just wow. I wondered how many times she had managed to succeed with this plan. I wasn’t special. I was not her crush. Hell, she probably was a catfish! I didn’t reply, didn’t try to come up with a witty comeback. I just blocked her. And she disappeared, along with the version of me that thought something that easy would be real. Because in all honesty the scam started the moment I felt I was special.
