In the spirit of transparency, I must admit I enjoyed my first experience with an internet scammer. However, I honestly thought it would be a one-time thing.

Shortly after publishing “The Housing Heist”  I decided to stop looking for a new place to live for a little while and stay put. I’ve just recently resumed my online search for new housing accomodations and… you guessed it… I’ve come in contact with YET ANOTHER SCAMMER.

I used a made up name and email address from the get-go this time, with no ties to me or the weird @hadleyfoo brand I’ve built for myself online that will ultimately come back to haunt me should I ever decide to run for political office.

With that said, I would like to introduce you to my new alter ego Robert Jackson, who I created just for this scam. I hope you enjoy my latest, and Robs first Internet scammer experience!

This house didn’t really stand out to me as being all that amazing but I LOVED the neighborhood it was in so decided to email the add poster on Craigslist…

And there it was. By the 5th word I already knew this was a scam. For those of you familiar with my previous scam story you’ll remember Andrews Connie (the scammer) said “kindly this” and “kindly that” about 10 times per email. It’s just not a phase you really hear Americans using. You’d think con artists would kindly pick up on this…

I couldn’t wait to see the details of this scam… I mean… this house.

“I want you to know that we are not after the money…” We’ll see about that Lola. Something tells me that’s all you’re after…

Would Lola be willing to rent her home to an ex-convict like myself? No sane person who truly cared about their home would, right?

I really lucked out Lola didn’t have a “NO CONVICTED FELONS” clause in her rental application. Hopefully I can list a few impressive traits when filling this thing out…

Hidden application gems:
1- First name: Robert. Short for Rob. As in steal.
2- Last name: Jackson. As in Jackson (Jax) Teller from AMC’s Sons of Anarchy.
3-The address listed on the license is actually to the Logan City Police Department.
4- The license number is 527199712 (or 5-27-1997-12). It stands for May 27, 1997. The day #12 sent the Utah Jazz to their first NBA Finals appearance.

Now all I could do was wait and hope Lola was cool with a convicted felon smoking and drinking in her house everyday…

I was honored to be considered as “favorite Tenant.” I’m curious who the other applicants were if an ex-con who just did 10 years in prison was the clear favorite. Lola’s FedEx box cracked me up. If there’s one thing an ex-convict like myself knows about it’s tampering with things and this box DEFINITELY looks like it’s been tampered with…

That’s not an outlandish request, right?

South Carolina zip codes do begin with 29 but I think Lola’s still a few numbers short…

I really didn’t want to waste these five limited edition Andrews Connie stamps. I wonder what my old scammer is up to these days anyways…

Put on those coke bottle reading glasses and take another look at that email, Lola. I offered to mail you $4,100 cash OR wire you $200. You can’t scam me twice during this scam.

AND the cats out of the bag. I’ll be honest, it felt good filling my soon-to-be landlord in on my shady past. How would Lola react? Would she retract her rental offer when she finds out I stole $8,675,309 from Walmart? I would. Not even Tommy Tutone would be able to rent a home after a crime like that.

Nope. She didn’t care.

The fun thing about 7-Eleven is that after you’ve been inside one for 10 seconds the smell stays on your skin for two weeks.

“Well i understand you so much…” So Lola’s also shot and ran over people after robbing a store? Sounds like my kinda landlord.

Anyone who’s ever stepped foot inside of a 7-Eleven knows this is not what they look like but something tells me Lola hasn’t ever been to America let alone a 7-Eleven.

Lola’s responses are quick and to the point. MUCH shorter than my last scammers. Oh well, as long as she keeps responding I’ll continue to “proceed further more..” 

Originally, my list of questions for Lola was twice as long but I thought I’d better dial it back a bit for fear she’d give up on me and move on to her next victim.

You sound skeptic about sending your money to a complete stranger online and that’s very wrong… I love that Lola referred to herself as “a woman of God” and “a Hard Working man that always keeps to his words” in the same email.

Anyone familiar with Sons of Anarchy knows the woman in this picture isn’t Jax Tellers probation officer but rather his evil mother Gemma Teller Morrow. I’m crossing my fingers that actress  Katey Sagal isn’t the only bit of American culture my new friend Lola is familiar with…

Please take a second and re-read Lola’s answers. Then read them again. I literally fell our of my chair, doubled over in laughter when I read this email! Lola’s answers left me with  SO MANY MORE QUESTIONS.

Lola didn’t respond for a day. I’m assuming she was busy flipping through old family photo albums, trying to find the best pictures of her family to send to an ex-convict she’d never met before…

Finally! We know what the beautiful Lola looks like! Pay no attention to the fact that she’s got three kids in the picture when her questionnaire clearly states she only has two. I love the name of her picture in the attachment “I AND MY FAMILY LOVELY PICTURE.”

I uploaded these pictures into a Google reverse image search and found out they belonged to a woman operating a DIY craft blog out of Melbourne, Australia. I stalked her blog, Facebook and Instagram accounts for a few minutes and came to a solid conclusion that she wasn’t the one running this scam.

I was almost ready to send Lola my money now that I had a face to go with the name but there were just a few things in her questionnaire I needed to address first for my own peace of mind…

These aren’t crazy questions for me to be asking, right? If you met someone with feet that were THREE FEET long wouldn’t you want to dive into their background a little bit too?

If caring is a crime then lock me up in prison for another 10 years…

My first scammer Andrews, constantly included his payment details and reminded me how much I owed him in his emails, sometimes even multiple times per email. Lola had only sent me her payment details once and the payment amount twice, but it said two different things. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be sending her $1,100 or $500, so I had just been saying $200 and she hadn’t corrected me yet. We’ll see what she says when she sees I’ve completely messed up the payment details…

Lola corrected her name, and finally gave me the last three digits of her zip code but didn’t say anything about the $200 payment so I decided to stick with that. I didn’t think anyone could be more careless with their scam than Andrews was but Lola just might have him beat. Maybe she’s just more focused not dying while breathing 60-times per minute…

It seems as though Dave Grohl works at the local 7-Eleven when he’s not rocking sold out stadiums with his band the Foo Fighters. Would Lola notice the 20 Foo Fighters songs I’d mentioned in all-caps?

I guess Lola’s not obsessed with the Foo Fighters like I am. Oh well, it was time to send her $175 so we could proceed further…

Fun fact: Dave from the 7-Eleven store said this is the largest amount of money anyone had ever requested to put on a 7-Eleven gift card.

Dear Lola, I’m just joking with you, but this is fun so lets keep it going a little longer. -Rob

I was pretty mean to Lola in my email. Hopefully it doesn’t get her heart pumping even faster in anger…

Lola was calm and collected. She probably knew if she got worked up her heart would explode. Meanwhile, I was trying not to get too worked up at the thought that I might be be stuck with $175 worth of 7-Eleven in-store credit…

I knew Lola wouldn’t get my Foo Fighters references but I didn’t care. They were too fun to do. The all-caps words this time were the titles of all nine Foo Fighters albums.

This was the first time I made mention of buying Lola’s home rather than renting it. I was curious if she’d notice or if she’d be too fixated on the fact that I dropped my offer to $55 but when she didn’t reply I thought she might have finally given up. So I emailed her again…

Sure, my email was a little rude. But I needed to A) show Lola that I wasn’t afraid to take my $55 elsewhere and B) point out that she should be with a man who was concerned about her 60 PBM heart rate.

How about I “make the money” less than my last offer of $55 Lola…

It was pretty obvious that Lola would agree to whatever amount of money I said I could send her so I decided to challenge myself and see if I could also get her to agree to leave her husband and come live with me.

The ’50$ mission’ was easily accomplished. The ‘leave her husband mission’ might take a little more work…

Every other Christmas was a reasonable enough compromise, right?

Well, that was easier than I thought it would be. New home AND a new wife. I’m one lucky man! Except I didn’t agree to every Christmas. I said every other…

I was already having second thoughts about agreeing to every-other Christmas with Lola’s kids. Even that felt like too much…

I love that Lola has no problem giving up her children but wanted to make sure we were on the same page as far as the $50 payment details go. My kinda heartless woman!

I was telling my mom about this scam when she jokingly asked what kind of pie Lola liked, seeing how she’d be with us at Thanksgiving, so I asked her…

Hidden love message: The 10-digit reference number, when spelled out on a telephone, reads I-HEART-LOLA.

A day passed and Lola hadn’t replied so I emailed her again…

Another day passed. Now I was getting VERY worried. Perhaps her deadbeat husband convinced her to stay in South Carolina with her horrible family?

Surely Lola wouldn’t keep ignoring me after seeing my MISSING poster…

Things were a bit rocky between Lola and I but at least I knew she was alive. I love that she told me to stop contacting her but still thanked me for my time. Such a classy woman.

Part of me thought Lola wouldn’t reply to my email and the story would end here but then she sent me this…

LOLA AND I ARE IN LOVEEEEEE!

At this point I was OK with this scam coming to an end. Lola had already agreed to a mere $50 for the deed to her home, told me she loved me and would leave her family for me, told me she still wets the bed, etc. I just really wanted to keep it going until I found out what her favorite kind of pie was but she wouldn’t respond…

Still nothing… She’s taking this pie decision very seriously.

After three unanswered emails I was pretty sure Lola was done. I just really wanted to know what her favorite kind of pie was so reached out to her one last time. Maybe a threatening subject line, large font and frightening picture attached would do the trick…

For some reason I suddenly had $6,000 I could send Lola. I figured if that didn’t get a response from her nothing would…

Lola’s grammer was particularly bad in this email. I blame it on her bad husband.

I just really want to know her favorite pie. Is that too much to ask??

Still no mention of the pie but Lola’s reply gave me a great idea. If you notice the little details, you’ll remember that earlier in this story, on the 7-Eleven counter was an advertisement for an unbeatable deal from Southwest Airlines…

I couldn’t wait to see Lola try and weasel her way out of this flight. But I also still really wanted to know what her favorite pie was…

Strumpleberry Pie (with strudel) sauce is a pie my friends and I made up while living in England years ago. People would ask what food we missed from back home and this was always our reply. They would say they’d never heard of it and we’d go on and on about how amazing this make-believe pie is. I was secretly hoping Lola would pick this one but she didn’t respond…

Once again, like every other time I’ve threatened to take my business elsewhere, Lola responded. But it WAS NOT the response I was expecting. She replied mid-day, while I was at work instead of her usual 2 AM responses. Here’s what followed…

It was pretty clear that Lola was done trying to scam me after telling me she was waiting at the airport. She’d had enough of me. Now she was just toying with me like I’d been toying with her all along. I sent another email because I refused to let this thing die until I knew what her favorite kind of pie was…

Still no response. I was mentally prepared to ask her every day for the rest of my life if needs be…

DAY 1

DAY 2

DAY 3

DAY 4

DAY 5

DAY 6

DAY 7

DAY 8

DAY 9

It had been over a week since Lola emailed last and she wasn’t responding to my daily piEmails. There was only so many pie rhymes and puns I could come up with for these subject lines so I decided it was time to call it quits. There was no better way to end this madness than by paying tribute to Lola and the Foo Fighters with their smash hit My Hero.

Like my last scammer, I decided to email Lola one last time and let her know we were through. It was the least I could do for the man and/or woman who agreed to leave his/her family and move across the country for a violent ex-convict like myself.

IN CONCLUSION:
I’ll never know what happened to Lola Mae Felder that fateful day at the Logan Airport. Judging by her last words to me, “Am there can,t you find me??” I’m assuming she collapsed and died in the corridor as she was emailing me shortly after her arrival. All the excitement of a new life with a new love was just too much for her sickly little heart to handle. This is the emotional baggage I will have to carry on my shoulders for the rest of my life but I’ll survive. Rob Jackson will be just fine. The biggest disappointment in Lola’s death is the fact that I never learned what her favorite kind of pie is. That one will eat away at me forever.

ON A MORE SERIOUS NOTE:
I was blown away by the responses after my first scammer story went viral. Dozens of complete strangers reached out to me saying they or their loved ones had fallen for very similar scams in the past and lost large amounts of money.

If something sounds too good to be true or seems a little suspect, IT PROBABLY IS! Do some research before doing  business with anyone you don’t know online. There are so many easy little things you can do. Here’s a new one I learned during this scam:

Did you know you can track where an email is being sent from? It’s simple. I clicked on “view message source” on one of Lola’s emails, where I got this jumbled code that included her IP address:

I then went to one of hundreds of sites that track IP addresses and got this report:

I plugged these GPS coordinates into Google and found Lola’s emails were being sent near Wichita Kansas, which oddly enough, is where my first Internet scammer said he lived:

I’m not proclaiming to be some tech-savvy computer programmer. I realize there are ways you can mask an IP address and it doesn’t necessarily mean this is where Lola’s emails were being sent from, but look at the user comments. There were several warnings stating this IP address is a known scammer. (Side note: I’ll probably be emailing Lola very soon from a new email address inquiring about this military romance and Russian dating service she offers. Stay tuned for that.) This information literally took me no longer than 5 minutes to look up.

If you’ve found a deal online that you’re skeptical about and not quite sure what to do, ask a friend. Ask Google. That’s what I did. Or if you’re really in a pinch and time is of the essence, I am more than happy to help you out. Just kindly send me $200 via Western Union Money Transfer and I will send you several very informative documents via this next day FedEx courier service.

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