I got conned in Vancouver last week. I know the Durham section isn't necessarily the place to be telling this story, but the Durham section is full of my hobbying brothers. If the admins decide to move it to the lobby, then so be it.
So yeah, I got conned in Vancouver last week via CL. It was a hell of a con, but I ignored a lot of red flags along the way too. And I come back here to, one, give you the heads up about this kind of con, and, two, to tell you a story of immense failure. All for a hundred lousy bucks. Strap in for a novella.
I decided when I got to Vancouver (for business) that it was going to be a week of debauchery. 3000km away from the wife, a wallet full of cash I had been pulling out of the bank account in anticipation of the trip, and a certain sense of security to be able to post ads in CL without the risk of anyone I know seeing them. Well, unfortunately, my week did not go as planned. For one - Vancouver SPs are expensive as fuck. No wonder they think we're cheap in Durham because in Vancouver you'll see $160 hh rates at the low end of pricing. And being a Durham man, I balked hard at those prices.
On the other end of things, the CL ad was going just about as well as I expected it to. 98% bot responses, 1.5% responses from people who weren't bots but were probably dudes pretending to be women, and .4% people who I think were real women but who bailed last second. Then there was the 0.1%.
0.1% was a response to my ad in the m4mw section. Yes, I posted there. There's better chances of finding real people in there and, while I don't want any man on man contact, I don't mind the pig roasts and eiffel towers. The response was pretty basic: "Hey, we're in. Free all day tomorrow and evening. xxx-xxx-xxxx." It included a picture of a middle aged couple, just their faces. It wasn't a bot - the bots all used the same email structure and didn't send face pictures. I took a risk and texted the number. It was the husband and he asked me to call him on a different number. This was red-flag-that-I-ignored #1. He said it was because he does "fun" business on his work phone and he doesn't want them seeing him calling long distance so it had to be incoming. That turned out to be bullshit but we'll get to that. Aside from that, I don't even like calling SPs so I was pretty hesitant on this, but I had one day left to close a CL deal before going home and I was getting twitchy. So I called him. He was friendly and a fast talker. An extrovert to the extreme.
Here's where I made mistake #2. I don't do burner phones because I've got nowhere to hide them and texting and calling apps are unreliable, so I texted and called him with my own number. He spotted that it was a 905 number and honed in on that. He was also originally from the 905 (which, to the best that I can tell, he actually was. He named landmarks and and restaurants in Oshawa). With that info, he was able to fast talk out of me my approximate home location. Not exactly the location - I gave him an intersection a couple km away - but close enough.
So anyway, he's talking away about his wife, how she's a little partier, and asking if I "dabble" like they do (meaning coke). I said no, and I at least had the wherewithal to tell him that I wouldn't be comfortable with that happening in my work-paid hotel room. So he let it go. We agreed that we would meet at 7pm the next night. He asked me to text him to confirm the next morning and I could even talk to his wife on the phone if I wanted because I had expressed my doubts about them being the real deal.
So next morning comes, I text to confirm, he says yes, but no offer to talk to his wife comes. That's red-flag-I-ignore #2. I don't press the issue because I'm a pussy and an idiot. I'm also impressed because other couples I had been talking to that week had all bailed on the morning-of. So far this guy was at least seeming more legit than the rest of them.
6:45pm rolls around and he texts me his "work number" again to call him. So I do. Fast talking ensues. Now he's talking about getting some more girls in - SPs. His wife asked to have another woman there because "she just loves women". Great. Getting an SP? Right up my alley. I agree. He also asks if I want 420. I'm not really a smoker but I could use something to take the edge off of my anxiety with this guy so I say yes. Dude talks so fast, half the time I'm not sure what I'm agreeing to (red-flag-I-ignored #3). Then he tells me his wife wants him to meet me first without her to make sure I'm not a weirdo, and that he's just leaving now from work and would meet me at 7:30. This is red flags numbers 4 and 5. Every interaction I had with him where we set a time, he'd be extremely late. First time we were texting, he said he'd call me in 2 minutes and then 10 minutes later asked me to call him instead. Now he was leaving late and arriving late. PLUS he said in his original email that he and his wife were free all day, but he's just coming from work now? The perpetual lateness ended up being a part of his scheme that I'll re-highlight later.
7:50 he's not here, so I call him again. He says he's had to park his car and was about to hop on the subway because of a bad accident on the highway and that it'll delay him another 40 minutes. This also turned out to be a red flag. Around 8:20 I got twitchy again and checked the traffic. No traffic. But maybe the traffic cleared up after he got on the subway? It had been 30 minutes since I talked to him. I ignored it, even though my shitty spidey senses were pinging.
At 8:30 he called me. From the hotel lobby phone. He's here. I go to meet him downstairs (hotel needed a card to get up the elevator) and he was the guy from the picture. Great. Must be legit. We go back up to my hotel room to hash out plans. (I should pause here to note that I wasn't a complete tool about this. I had moved all of my valuables to my car in the parking garage and only left behind some cash, my room card, and my phone [which made me super nervous but I had no other means of communicating with him before he arrived] I wasn't letting this dude, his wife, or the supposed SPs that were coming anywhere near my shit.) In the hotel room, he talks my ear off. We're going to get some girls, get some pot, have a great time. I tell him about my hobbying history and he manages to squeak some more personal info out of me in the process. Then we talk about the girl he's going to order, whom he and his wife's apparently dealt with before. He shows me her BP ad (could have been anyone) and then asks how much I'm willing to chip in for her. He says it'll be about $250 total for 1.5 hours. That's the next red flag. I've spent my week looking at BP and Leo girls in Vancouver. None of them charge less than $250/hr for ONE person as an INCALL. This one was going to do an outcall for 3 people including a female for $250? Insanity. And I knew it. But again, I shrugged it off. He had a history with her, made it sound like he had gotten her out of a tough spot and maybe that she owed him a discount.
I agree to chip in $100, he said he'd cover the rest. Red flag #30?
To this day, I'm not sure if he actually called this girl or not. He had a full on conversation with someone on the phone that he said was her, referenced their history, and gave her his credit card number? Don't know many BP girls who accept credit card over the phone (or at all) but this is the strange and different land of Vancouver after all, so I don't know shit.
This is where I made my second biggest mistake. He faked me out and made it sound like the girl wanted to confirm that the hotel room was legit. I told him my last name and room number and then after they hung up she "confirmed" by calling the hotel. I would assume that my room phone would have rang at that point when the hotel transferred her to me, but no. Maybe she hung up right after they transferred her? WHAT DO I KNOW?
I commented on the girl accepting a credit card and he laughed about it and then did something weird and wrote his credit card number and expiry date and name down for me. "Just in case anything goes wrong and you need it." Weird, I thought, but he was fast talking me again. I pocketed the number. He told me a story about how he had done this once before but then forgotten the number on a restaurant table and someone had taken it and was buying shit off his card. Prepaid credit cards cashed in to his paypal. He was very specific. This would come back later too.
I asked when his wife would be here. 9:30 he says, she's just finishing up work and she'll come right over. Again - weren't they supposed to be free all day? Red flag.
Finally, he looks at his phone and says "Ok, my pot guy's almost here. I'm going to go downstairs and grab it from him. Can I get the $100 from you now? I need to deposit it because paying on my credit card's going to be a problem when the wife sees it." This was strange and another red flag. But, because I'm an idiot, I counted the money in front of him (still had $70 left over) and handed him the $100. He told me to lock the remainder in my safe and don't let the SP anywhere near it. Such a trustworthy thing to say (I genuinely thought). Then he asked me to hold on to his credit card and stow it away somewhere safe. I don't even remember why, but he was being such a trustworthy and generous guy that I decided to do this favour for him. I also felt like it guaranteed his return with women in tow. I locked the credit card in my safe as well.
He left. 10 minutes, he said.
10 minutes.
20 minutes.
30 minutes.
I kept waiting. This guy was perpetually late, after all. He was probably just being late again. At 40 minutes I started to piece together that I had gotten conned. At 50 minutes I called him. Straight to a machine that said that there was no voicemail for this number. Called again. Straight to the machine. Called the phone he had been texting me on. It rang a few rings and then went to an actual voicemail where I heard the guy's voice. He even said the same first name that he introduced himself as - "Martin" (Peters). A few more calls, a text, and 20 minutes later, I knew I had officially been duped.
I got mad - he went through a lot of fucking trouble to con me out of a hundred lousy dollars. He even gave me his credit card! I can get him arrested so fast. Or... I can steal some shit off of his card, right? Yeah, what an idiot, I'll steal some shit with his card! He even told me that someone did that to him once. The idiot.
Wait... that is his credit card, right? I opened the safe and pulled it out - it was a Visa debit so there was no name on the front. I flipped it over. There was a messy signature. A messy signature that definitely did not say [edited by moderator]
I pulled the paper out of my pocket with the credit card number written on it. The number matched the Visa debit except for two random digits that were changed. Yup. No doubt now, I had gotten straight conned.
So now my biggest issue isn't the $100, I don't give a shit about $100. My biggest issue is all the information he squeezed out of me without much effort. He knew my phone number, he knew approximately where I lived, he knew I was married, he knew my last name and my hotel number. If I tried to get the cops on him or anything, he had all the blackmail material he needed. Hell, he didn't even need to wait for me to chase him, if he was feeling particularly chaotic all he had to do was go to google with that info and ruin my life with one message to my wife, whom he could find and identify in less than 5 steps.
AND he had my last name and hotel room number. The hotel was rich with amenities they would charge straight to your room (restaurant downstairs, liquor store, flower store). I called the front desk and asked if any charges had been charged against the room this evening. Only one - high speed internet. The bastard had connected himself to my high speed wifi. I had even logged in to the wifi on his phone myself but handed it back to him without selecting the free internet package. I asked them to lock my account against further charges and to call me if anyone tried anything.
Then I went to work googling myself and getting anything with my name and/or phone number associated with it locked down or removed. My old Myspace and fuckin DeviantArt accounts got deleted; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn went on hyper lock, and I got my phone number removed from some volunteering websites I'm associated with. And then I prayed to all the gods I don't believe in that he hadn't gotten to my information first. So far, half a week later, nothing's happened. I hope it stays that way.
Lastly, I took the credit card and written card number down to the hotel lobby and tossed it in a public trash can.
And that's my story. If you want to let me hear it in the comments, I wouldn't blame you. But trust me - you can't kick me much harder than I've already kicked myself. Learning experience of the decade for me.
So yeah, I got conned in Vancouver last week via CL. It was a hell of a con, but I ignored a lot of red flags along the way too. And I come back here to, one, give you the heads up about this kind of con, and, two, to tell you a story of immense failure. All for a hundred lousy bucks. Strap in for a novella.
I decided when I got to Vancouver (for business) that it was going to be a week of debauchery. 3000km away from the wife, a wallet full of cash I had been pulling out of the bank account in anticipation of the trip, and a certain sense of security to be able to post ads in CL without the risk of anyone I know seeing them. Well, unfortunately, my week did not go as planned. For one - Vancouver SPs are expensive as fuck. No wonder they think we're cheap in Durham because in Vancouver you'll see $160 hh rates at the low end of pricing. And being a Durham man, I balked hard at those prices.
On the other end of things, the CL ad was going just about as well as I expected it to. 98% bot responses, 1.5% responses from people who weren't bots but were probably dudes pretending to be women, and .4% people who I think were real women but who bailed last second. Then there was the 0.1%.
0.1% was a response to my ad in the m4mw section. Yes, I posted there. There's better chances of finding real people in there and, while I don't want any man on man contact, I don't mind the pig roasts and eiffel towers. The response was pretty basic: "Hey, we're in. Free all day tomorrow and evening. xxx-xxx-xxxx." It included a picture of a middle aged couple, just their faces. It wasn't a bot - the bots all used the same email structure and didn't send face pictures. I took a risk and texted the number. It was the husband and he asked me to call him on a different number. This was red-flag-that-I-ignored #1. He said it was because he does "fun" business on his work phone and he doesn't want them seeing him calling long distance so it had to be incoming. That turned out to be bullshit but we'll get to that. Aside from that, I don't even like calling SPs so I was pretty hesitant on this, but I had one day left to close a CL deal before going home and I was getting twitchy. So I called him. He was friendly and a fast talker. An extrovert to the extreme.
Here's where I made mistake #2. I don't do burner phones because I've got nowhere to hide them and texting and calling apps are unreliable, so I texted and called him with my own number. He spotted that it was a 905 number and honed in on that. He was also originally from the 905 (which, to the best that I can tell, he actually was. He named landmarks and and restaurants in Oshawa). With that info, he was able to fast talk out of me my approximate home location. Not exactly the location - I gave him an intersection a couple km away - but close enough.
So anyway, he's talking away about his wife, how she's a little partier, and asking if I "dabble" like they do (meaning coke). I said no, and I at least had the wherewithal to tell him that I wouldn't be comfortable with that happening in my work-paid hotel room. So he let it go. We agreed that we would meet at 7pm the next night. He asked me to text him to confirm the next morning and I could even talk to his wife on the phone if I wanted because I had expressed my doubts about them being the real deal.
So next morning comes, I text to confirm, he says yes, but no offer to talk to his wife comes. That's red-flag-I-ignore #2. I don't press the issue because I'm a pussy and an idiot. I'm also impressed because other couples I had been talking to that week had all bailed on the morning-of. So far this guy was at least seeming more legit than the rest of them.
6:45pm rolls around and he texts me his "work number" again to call him. So I do. Fast talking ensues. Now he's talking about getting some more girls in - SPs. His wife asked to have another woman there because "she just loves women". Great. Getting an SP? Right up my alley. I agree. He also asks if I want 420. I'm not really a smoker but I could use something to take the edge off of my anxiety with this guy so I say yes. Dude talks so fast, half the time I'm not sure what I'm agreeing to (red-flag-I-ignored #3). Then he tells me his wife wants him to meet me first without her to make sure I'm not a weirdo, and that he's just leaving now from work and would meet me at 7:30. This is red flags numbers 4 and 5. Every interaction I had with him where we set a time, he'd be extremely late. First time we were texting, he said he'd call me in 2 minutes and then 10 minutes later asked me to call him instead. Now he was leaving late and arriving late. PLUS he said in his original email that he and his wife were free all day, but he's just coming from work now? The perpetual lateness ended up being a part of his scheme that I'll re-highlight later.
7:50 he's not here, so I call him again. He says he's had to park his car and was about to hop on the subway because of a bad accident on the highway and that it'll delay him another 40 minutes. This also turned out to be a red flag. Around 8:20 I got twitchy again and checked the traffic. No traffic. But maybe the traffic cleared up after he got on the subway? It had been 30 minutes since I talked to him. I ignored it, even though my shitty spidey senses were pinging.
At 8:30 he called me. From the hotel lobby phone. He's here. I go to meet him downstairs (hotel needed a card to get up the elevator) and he was the guy from the picture. Great. Must be legit. We go back up to my hotel room to hash out plans. (I should pause here to note that I wasn't a complete tool about this. I had moved all of my valuables to my car in the parking garage and only left behind some cash, my room card, and my phone [which made me super nervous but I had no other means of communicating with him before he arrived] I wasn't letting this dude, his wife, or the supposed SPs that were coming anywhere near my shit.) In the hotel room, he talks my ear off. We're going to get some girls, get some pot, have a great time. I tell him about my hobbying history and he manages to squeak some more personal info out of me in the process. Then we talk about the girl he's going to order, whom he and his wife's apparently dealt with before. He shows me her BP ad (could have been anyone) and then asks how much I'm willing to chip in for her. He says it'll be about $250 total for 1.5 hours. That's the next red flag. I've spent my week looking at BP and Leo girls in Vancouver. None of them charge less than $250/hr for ONE person as an INCALL. This one was going to do an outcall for 3 people including a female for $250? Insanity. And I knew it. But again, I shrugged it off. He had a history with her, made it sound like he had gotten her out of a tough spot and maybe that she owed him a discount.
I agree to chip in $100, he said he'd cover the rest. Red flag #30?
To this day, I'm not sure if he actually called this girl or not. He had a full on conversation with someone on the phone that he said was her, referenced their history, and gave her his credit card number? Don't know many BP girls who accept credit card over the phone (or at all) but this is the strange and different land of Vancouver after all, so I don't know shit.
This is where I made my second biggest mistake. He faked me out and made it sound like the girl wanted to confirm that the hotel room was legit. I told him my last name and room number and then after they hung up she "confirmed" by calling the hotel. I would assume that my room phone would have rang at that point when the hotel transferred her to me, but no. Maybe she hung up right after they transferred her? WHAT DO I KNOW?
I commented on the girl accepting a credit card and he laughed about it and then did something weird and wrote his credit card number and expiry date and name down for me. "Just in case anything goes wrong and you need it." Weird, I thought, but he was fast talking me again. I pocketed the number. He told me a story about how he had done this once before but then forgotten the number on a restaurant table and someone had taken it and was buying shit off his card. Prepaid credit cards cashed in to his paypal. He was very specific. This would come back later too.
I asked when his wife would be here. 9:30 he says, she's just finishing up work and she'll come right over. Again - weren't they supposed to be free all day? Red flag.
Finally, he looks at his phone and says "Ok, my pot guy's almost here. I'm going to go downstairs and grab it from him. Can I get the $100 from you now? I need to deposit it because paying on my credit card's going to be a problem when the wife sees it." This was strange and another red flag. But, because I'm an idiot, I counted the money in front of him (still had $70 left over) and handed him the $100. He told me to lock the remainder in my safe and don't let the SP anywhere near it. Such a trustworthy thing to say (I genuinely thought). Then he asked me to hold on to his credit card and stow it away somewhere safe. I don't even remember why, but he was being such a trustworthy and generous guy that I decided to do this favour for him. I also felt like it guaranteed his return with women in tow. I locked the credit card in my safe as well.
He left. 10 minutes, he said.
10 minutes.
20 minutes.
30 minutes.
I kept waiting. This guy was perpetually late, after all. He was probably just being late again. At 40 minutes I started to piece together that I had gotten conned. At 50 minutes I called him. Straight to a machine that said that there was no voicemail for this number. Called again. Straight to the machine. Called the phone he had been texting me on. It rang a few rings and then went to an actual voicemail where I heard the guy's voice. He even said the same first name that he introduced himself as - "Martin" (Peters). A few more calls, a text, and 20 minutes later, I knew I had officially been duped.
I got mad - he went through a lot of fucking trouble to con me out of a hundred lousy dollars. He even gave me his credit card! I can get him arrested so fast. Or... I can steal some shit off of his card, right? Yeah, what an idiot, I'll steal some shit with his card! He even told me that someone did that to him once. The idiot.
Wait... that is his credit card, right? I opened the safe and pulled it out - it was a Visa debit so there was no name on the front. I flipped it over. There was a messy signature. A messy signature that definitely did not say [edited by moderator]
I pulled the paper out of my pocket with the credit card number written on it. The number matched the Visa debit except for two random digits that were changed. Yup. No doubt now, I had gotten straight conned.
So now my biggest issue isn't the $100, I don't give a shit about $100. My biggest issue is all the information he squeezed out of me without much effort. He knew my phone number, he knew approximately where I lived, he knew I was married, he knew my last name and my hotel number. If I tried to get the cops on him or anything, he had all the blackmail material he needed. Hell, he didn't even need to wait for me to chase him, if he was feeling particularly chaotic all he had to do was go to google with that info and ruin my life with one message to my wife, whom he could find and identify in less than 5 steps.
AND he had my last name and hotel room number. The hotel was rich with amenities they would charge straight to your room (restaurant downstairs, liquor store, flower store). I called the front desk and asked if any charges had been charged against the room this evening. Only one - high speed internet. The bastard had connected himself to my high speed wifi. I had even logged in to the wifi on his phone myself but handed it back to him without selecting the free internet package. I asked them to lock my account against further charges and to call me if anyone tried anything.
Then I went to work googling myself and getting anything with my name and/or phone number associated with it locked down or removed. My old Myspace and fuckin DeviantArt accounts got deleted; Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn went on hyper lock, and I got my phone number removed from some volunteering websites I'm associated with. And then I prayed to all the gods I don't believe in that he hadn't gotten to my information first. So far, half a week later, nothing's happened. I hope it stays that way.
Lastly, I took the credit card and written card number down to the hotel lobby and tossed it in a public trash can.
And that's my story. If you want to let me hear it in the comments, I wouldn't blame you. But trust me - you can't kick me much harder than I've already kicked myself. Learning experience of the decade for me.
). I tell it because I love this board and I love telling the board stories and helping others out where I've failed. I also literally can't tell anyone else in the world and it's therapeutic to get this off my chest.
