I was contacted by the man in the photo (the bottom one where he's standing in front of what seems to be the Eiffel Tower) on July 29th, 2019 via e-mail. He said his name is Nick George, and that he had found my photo/profile from the website meetup.com where I was a member of the group "Local and Expat Singles". We exchanged emails a few times, and in one of those emails, he said he's in the process of moving to Hong Kong where his son lives with his ex-wife & her current husband. That's why he came across my profile as he was searching for information about life in Hong Kong for expats.
He said that he currently lives in the US, but was born & raised in Austria, and went to school in Italy before moving to the US 14 years ago. After a few email exchanges, we exchanged our Whatsapp number. I have been a victim of online love scam before (where I lost more than US$75,000), so I was quite skeptical about him. But I thought I would give him a chance to prove if he's real or not first. One interesting thing I noticed is that at the end of each of the email he sent me, he would put "contractor @ Gammon Construction Limited" at the end of his message. When I googled the company name, I did find there's a company of the same name in Hong Kong (where I currently reside at) and it's a legitimate company. I have a feeling that he put that information to try to convince me that he's moving to Hong Kong as he claimed.
We started to communicating via Whatsapp by July 31st, 2019. The photo of his Whatsapp profile is the one on the right (the one with Eiffel Tower in the background). When I did a search of that photo on the internet, I found numerous love scam websites where the photo has been posted on. I didn't confront him right away, but I became 100% convinced that he's a scammer. On Thursday (Aug 1st), while we were communicating via Whatsapp, he asked me to send him another photo of myself. But I asked him to send me another photo of himself. He then sent me the other photo (the one where he's wearing a headphone). When I saw the photo, I immediately thought the two pictures are not of the same person. I actually told him that I thought the man in the photos are two different person. I then hinted to him that I had been a victim of love scam before, so I had to be very careful. He said I have the rights to check, and that if I find his photos on love scam warning sites, we can do a video chat via Skype, so that I would know he is whom he claims to be. Within a few minutes of that exchange, he removed his profile photo from his Whatsapp account, and he had either blocked me on Whatsapp, or has not being using Whatsapp since then. Later when I googled the second photo of him, I also found that it was posted on numerous online love scams websites.
I'm just glad that I did a check this time before getting sucked into another scam. Contact information used by the scammer:
Name: Nick George
From: USA (but was born & raised in Austria, and went to school in Italy)
WhatsApp number: (484) 918-8632
E-mail address: nickgeorge231@gmail.com
P.S. He was aware that there was a typhoon in Hong Kong last week, and of the ongoing protests in Hong Kong over the last 2 months. So he had definitely done his research about Hong Kong when he first contacted me.
