Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011. It is a news item from that month.
Love is a beautiful thing, although sometimes it hurts and sometimes it’s just business. Just ask this 48-year-old American man from Naperville, who met the love of his life online. After two and a half years of a virtual relationship and a promise to spend the rest of their lives together, a week before the long-awaited moment, he had the misfortune of learning that his virtual girlfriend had been kidnapped.
To see his girlfriend, he was asked to pay $200,000, split across several accounts, including some in Malaysia, Nigeria and England. Since people will do crazy things for love, he didn’t hesitate to pay the ransom.
Once the money was paid, he still heard nothing from his beloved, so he went to the police to explain the situation. Fortunately, he had a copy of his “girlfriend’s” driver’s license, which made the investigation much easier and led to a quick resolution of the case.
The driver’s license had been downloaded from Google Images, the photos of his virtual girlfriend had been taken from the internet, and his virtual girlfriend might not even have been a woman, since he never got to see her on a webcam. He had fallen for a Web 2.0 version of the “timo de la estampita” (a classic Spanish confidence trick).
According to the Sun-Times, the man has been left crushed and disappointed, and no wonder.
The lesson this American has learned is that love is sometimes a business, and the lesson the rest of us can take from this case is that a fool and his money are soon parted.
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Featured image: Samantha Bilodeau, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
