A Dallas woman publicly shared her most disturbing online dating experience, as she does not want anyone else to go through the nightmare she had suffered.
17-years ago Thompson and her husband separated, and after more than a decade without dating, she came across Match.com an online dating site, in January this year. In March, she came to know about a person named Robert Parker, a soldier serving in Special Force based in Cairo, but soon to retire. They started talking daily.
"When you are messaging people multiple times every day and actually praying for their safety when you think they’re fighting for our country, you develop a closeness pretty quickly," Thompson said.
Parker was kind to her and he seemed too good to be true. So he sent pictures of himself holding a sign that read “I’m real.”
Thompson said that they were in love and talked about their future.
"He said he was stationed in Fort Hood, so he would be coming back there to get his things, and then he was going to move to Dallas and buy a home," she said.
After his retirement, he said Thompson that he was caught up in Customs at the airport in Dubai and needed to pay for various paper works to pass through.
"It was wired to Citibank in New York, which I felt comfortable about," said Thompson.
But she asked a friend in baking if Robert Parker’s financial institutions were legitimate. The answer she got just shattered her heart.
"I lost $131,000," she said. "Which was a lot of the money that I‘ve saved up in the last 17 years since my divorce."
She then reached out to Dallas-based Trident Response Group, which is made up of military veterans. Their investigations confirmed that the scam that came from an IP address, all the way in Africa.
Robert Parker’s account is still on match, but no one is sure who the man is seen in the pictures Thompson received.
"If I can save people from that, by having to tell the story that I didn’t really want to share and make everybody aware that I was stupid enough to have it happen to me, that would be the silver lining that could come from this," she said.
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