Scammers steal identities of GIs to cheat women - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Scammers steal identities of GIs to cheat women

“Sgt. Mark Ray Smith” told Catherine Roberts everything she wanted to hear. He was a lonely special operations soldier from Alabama, deployed to Afghanistan. He had fallen for her and wanted to marry her.

But it was all a common scam. “Smith” was a heartless con man hiding behind a ruggedly handsome soldier’s photos — and it cost the British mother of three $127,000, forced her to sell her home and broke her heart. Police told her she may even have been in danger of kidnapping, she said.

Victims worldwide, like Roberts, are being duped by con men using the identities of soldiers — both dead and alive — from the lowliest private to Gen. George Casey, the chief of staff.

Scammers — many of them from African countries — have used social or dating sites to post profiles fabricated from photos and personal details stolen from some soldiers’ online profile pages, according to Master Sgt. C.J. Grisham, who uses his blog, “A Soldier’s Perspective,” to expose scammers using the soldier dating con.

“It can happen to absolutely anybody, and you see it happening to just about anybody, up to and including the chief of staff of the Army, the sergeant major of the Army, as well as the chiefs of each of the individual branches,” Grisham said. “It could happen to anybody who has a picture they put online.”

The unwitting soldiers are sometimes victims when their loved ones discover the online profiles and believe their soldiers are looking to cheat.

Grisham said the scam is a new twist on the so-called Nigerian 419 advance fee scam, and its popularity is growing, fueled by soldiers’ routine use of social networking sites and the Internet’s penetration into third-world havens for con men.

“In the past year, the traffic on my site related to the scams I write about has tripled,” Grisham said. “I’ll get 30 to 40 comments a day and 20 e-mails a day asking me to look into whether or not they’re being scammed.”

Army Criminal Investigation Command spokesman Chris Grey said the agency has worked to identify and notify soldiers when it learns that their photos have been misappropriated and to calm upset loved ones.

These scams can have consequences for the soldiers whose identities have been stolen. Grisham said that a few months ago, a troop from Fort Hood, Texas, called him in tears because his wife had moved out over a dating profile set up in his name, with his pictures. A woman who thought she had been corresponding romantically with the man had angrily tracked down the wife.

Grisham said he explained soldier dating scams to the wife and helped the couple avoid a pending divorce.

“We have seen instances where spouses, friends, family members are upset because they think this person is perpetrating this when they’re not,” Grey said. “We try to track down every soldier that we hear about, let them know their photograph or their name has been compromised.”

Scammers find American soldiers an effective cover because their images engender a trust and respect that can blind a person to other suspicious behavior, particularly if the victim is vulnerable and looking for love.

“A lot of people want to bend over backward to support troops, and there’s that mystique about a man in uniform that some ladies like,” Grisham said. “These ladies, they fall in love with this image of a soldier who’s a sweet-talker, and that all comes crashing down when they find out the truth.”

Carolyn J. Brown, a twice-divorced 64-year-old grandma in Brisbane, Australia, said she was contacted on a dating site in 2008 by a handsome gentleman claiming to be “Major” Kenneth Preston — with the photos of the Sergeant Major of the Army Kenneth O. Preston. “I was totally blown away that a man of his caliber would contact me and say he was interested in my profile,” she said.

The phony Preston said he was stationed in Iraq and terribly lonely since the death of his wife and children in a car accident. Brown didn’t know it then, but the real Preston is a happily married grandfather stationed in the U.S. and, for some reason, a popular choice for con men (the “Counterfeit Kenneth Preston” discussion thread on Facebook has inspired 250 posts).

After six months of romantic instant messaging and e-mails, “Preston” told Brown a convoluted story about some Iraqi cash he had stashed away and how he needed her money to help bring it into the country. Brown believed him but refused for ethical reasons.

Before Brown stumbled on the “Counterfeit Kenneth Preston” page, the con man was able to wheedle $100 from her every few weeks, as well as a mobile phone and an MP3 player — all sent to Ghana via Western Union. When she realized he was a faker, she sent him a furious e-mail. He disappeared and, to her knowledge, was never prosecuted.

Because the distances and jurisdictional issues, these cases are difficult to investigate and prosecute for Army Criminal Investigation Command, Grey said. Instead, the agency has opted to wage a public information campaign in an effort to warn people like Brown before they are taken.

“Not only don’t we want the public to be ripped off by these criminals, we don’t want them to walk away thinking they were ripped off by a U.S. soldier, sailor, Marine or airman,” Grey said.

If you’re in an Internet relationship with a soldier, and the soldier asks for money, Grey suggests contacting a current or former service member, or someone who knows one, to check out their would-be soldier’s story.

Scammers depend on their victims’ ignorance about the American military. A common false claim is that soldiers have no access to a phone in the war zone, so the victim must pay a fee to set one up. Another claim, backed with phony documents, is that the “soldier” needs the victim’s help to pay for his leave — which is, in reality, free.

Grey said the fake documents are typically “crude at best.” A 56-year-old widow in Ohio, who asked that her name not be used, received a leave request signed by “Comdr. Lt. General” Raymond T. Odierno — actually commanding general of Multi-National Force-Iraq, at the time. The big tip-off is that “Odierno” signed off with the Marine motto, “Semper Fidelis.”

The victims themselves are fighting back, swapping stories and posting stolen photos on Facebook’s “Stop the U.S. Army Dating Scam” and romancescum.com.

Sophisticated scam

Roberts, the 47-year-old divorcee in Leicester, England, was separated from her money by a very sophisticated version of this scam. After three months of romantic instant messaging and e-mailing with “Sgt. Mark Ray Smith,” supposedly a 43-year-old divorced soldier in Iraq, Roberts paid $365 via Western Union to set up a phone line.

Every other night for three months, for hours at a time, she had phone conversations with an American-sounding man. What hurts most, she said, is that he consoled her over the phone after her mother’s death.

“Whether it was someone extremely good at putting on accents or someone paid to do it, I don’t know,” she said. “I had phone conversations with this person after the funeral, crying and all the rest of it, and now I don’t know who it was. That’s a bit hard to take, but he was good.”

It all seemed very real. Roberts showed photos of “Smith” to friends and family, talked about their plans to buy a house together in the U.K. He told her he was in special operations, highly trained and performing work that was confidential. He explained communication lapses by saying he was on operations or using events that corresponded with the day’s news.

“Smith” wrote Roberts that she would have to make a formal request to a colonel for his leave. That set off a chain of official-looking bureaucratic processes that each required a series of payments of more than 1,000 pounds ($1,599).

“He told me when he got home, he would pay it all back,” she said. “It was like drip, drip, drip, another and another … It just went on an on and on.”

Meanwhile, she sank deeper into the scam, borrowing from friends, family and credit cards.

“You name it, I got it, every time he came back at me,” she said. “You’ve got to get this because I’ll be home in three days’ time, I know it’s been delayed, but I’ll be home in a week. Every time, I got the money, and I don’t know how I got away with it.”

She questioned why soldiers had no access to their own money and was told that money wasn’t necessary in the deserts of Iraq.

“On reflection, it’s totally mad, I know, but by then I was so far into it,” she said.

But on the day he was to leave camp, in March 2009, Roberts was devastated to receive word that her soldier’s leave was to be rejected. This sparked a new, bogus storyline and new cycles of payments, one series to supposedly bribe her soldier’s way to getting leave. Later, he had supposedly gone AWOL and was stranded in Amsterdam, where she was supposedly funding his travels.

After months of this, Roberts drove to a nearby U.K. military base where the scammer once said he had once been stationed, but nobody there knew him. That’s when she went to the police.

A final e-mail from the phony soldier asked Roberts to go to Amsterdam, where she would get her money back. She was to send details about her next of kin, what flight she planned to take and where she planned to stay. To the police, this was a tip-off that they planned to kidnap her for ransom.

Roberts said that she has sold her house to pay her debts, her credit score is shot, and she constantly gets e-mails from scammers. But what is hardest, she said, is that the emotions she felt for the fake soldier were real.

“I feel like I lost the love of my life,” she said.

When she looks at the photos of “Smith,” it is hard to reconcile the cunningly crafted illusion she fell for and the harsh reality.

“I would look at those photos and nothing had changed, even though at this point, I knew there was some Nigerian guy sitting in a bloody Internet café writing all this rubbish,” she said.

“I’m getting a lot better now, but when I look at those photos, I don’t see some Nigerian guy, I see him, and I know that that’s not reality, but that’s how they get you.”