This email arrived from ‘J’ before Christmas. It had me in tears and her words stayed with me all day. This eloquent and heart felt account of the reality of victims of Catfish tells of the emotion spinning manipulations endured at their hands. Thank you so much for sharing this J. It will help others so much knowing their feelings are not unusual.

I sought first to understand with an open mind, wanting to believe the best in you. Wanting to believe the picture you still paint for me.

But I also read and heard one story after the next, about men and women who have been devastated by online fraudsters.

And the ones about love-bombing catfish, who devise scams for money, really hit hard for me.

Many of those victims I learned from have spent years searching their scammers alias online, as they try to move through the impact their predator had on their lives.

But I simply can’t do this.

I am already exhausted.

There is no justice in a world where you pretend nothing happened, while I wait for you to admit that it did. It’s time to move on for me.

This is my letter of truth. One that I hope will also demonstrate to other men and women who have been through the emotional abuse of being deceived and exploited for someone else’s gain that, just because their offender will not admit what they have done, and just because they believed the lies they were fed, does not mean one has to forever question their reality or live with this alone. We are not losing our minds: gaslighting is a real manipulation that can fool anyone. It can make you distrust your own instincts.

I wish I could just walk away and say I should choose who I let into my life better, but your ruthlessly calculated and deceptive pursuit of me, and effort you go about hiding all of it mean you must start behaving better.

I get that the worldwide web and social media remain poorly regulated, but that doesn’t give me or anyone else permission to find ways to exploit that.

And this is certainly not how I wanted to handle my closure, an honest and fully detailed apology from you would have sufficed while I waited for you to repay me. The fact that you are intelligent enough to operate at the level you already do offers plenty indication and hope you could succeed at other opportunities for scratch, it makes me wonder if you’ve ever heard the saying “an honest days work for an honest days pay”.

I know now there are others like me at varying degrees, who I would never ask to take up the task of being so loud at hand towards you.
It is precisely the attempts to downplay what I tried to confront, convince me I am wrong which brings me to this letter. I am writing factual truths here, and will accept any legal ramifications that would result from what I have said in this letter.

This is not the type of writing someone in the throes of “psychosis” or loss of sanity would create. People don’t just run down their hall and throw up upon learning the truth about their relationship with someone. This is real.

We crossed paths in a support group. Intended to be a safe place for communicating about the moments or events people struggle with in their lives. Now I know support groups have become places for catfish or other fraudsters to take advantage of vulnerability. To hear of someone’s most intimate struggles, while at the same time knowingly inflicting more pain onto them… for money.

There is not one decent excuse for that.

And yet, you have used my struggles as a weapon against me, exploited them as a solid “pray for her” she is crazy out of her mind backstory. But I care more about preventing women from being fed through your grinder, than I do what they think of my sanity. At the end of the day I have helped others avoid being tangled up before they could thank me. Even one beautiful, trusting and caring soul left feeling confused and alone with a smaller bank account is too many.

It was upon learning the version you tell, as to why I was reaching out to women, that I finally realised you are still working harder at keeping these secrets hidden than you are at finding an honest way to rebuild.

Kind, nice people treat others as they would like to be treated. They do not make up having the same interests, or fabricate information about themselves in order to get women to think you are like-minded persons for selfish reasons. They don’t pretend they are unmarried while just returning back from their honeymoon.

You had a preface to your game: do not be resentful or spiteful. Never lie to you. Don’t fight with you and don’t hurt you. Many of the rules were broken from day 1 while you had already waged an undeclared war on my human psyche. But now we talk about repentance and forgiveness because it is convenient. My actions to those I have hurt, who deserved better, is what it means to make things right. Not words.

Before I learned there were others, while my reality was based on your reactions, it was hard to believe my recount of events… of things I heard and felt and saw with my very own eyes. So I’m being serious when I say excuse me in advance if not everyone who reads this has encountered you at this level. But I know what happened to me. And I had to investigate and fight so hard to uncover what I knew was true but was told by you I was inaccurate about. Down to scientific facts.

At best, you made a very premeditated effort to deceive and manipulate a woman capable of offering money to you. At best, you made a joke out of my hopes and dreams and personality. Maybe you thought that a Scarlet letter would shame me from reaching this point. I am not ashamed of being human with emotions, and at the time, a profound naivety that led me where I am.
I like to think you have chosen a temporary deplorable career path. But that doesn’t change the reality that I type this as one of your victims, and there’s no more time left in me for silence. What looks to you as harassment and stalking is a victim desperately searching for answers. Trying to take back their human dignity in knowing that this was never about them.

One of the more harsh and impactful damages that result from being victim of an online romance fraud is this perceived loss in the value of humanity. A sense of isolation, fear, shame and humiliation all at once, in moments where it used to seem intuitive to open up to other people. Now there’s an incessant nagging level of self-doubt…that I will miss some sign of a predator in disguise and my naivety or poor judgement will cause me to regret an introduction to a new face. There’s this need to recover without the closure to begin.

Until today.

But then again maybe God has put it on my heart to stop you from this… and to help others do the same, should they find themselves duped by a con artist who thinks they can do and say anything to exploit what they want in life. – J