The Scam That Could've Killed Me: A Response To "The War Vet, the Dating Site, and the Phone Call From Hell", by Vince Beiser, from Wired
Holy shit, this happened to me.
It was on Grindr. I got a text from this random profile, and his profile said he was 24. He looked old enough to me, in the pictures he provided, so I started talking to him. It got explicit, and I sent him a video of me masturbating, with his permission. He stopped texting suddenly, and then the "father" character started texting me, pulling the same, "This guy was underage, he's in so much trouble, bla bla bla," the whole shebang.
Thankfully, I panicked properly: I called my lawyer. I'd been talking to a lawyer in an unrelated civil lawsuit, so I rang him up and asked about a purely hypothetical situation of someone texting another person who lied about his age on a dating app. He was a prosecutor, so he was actually the one who insisted that I phrase it that way, so he couldn't claim to have heard any confessions of guilt from me. He gave me a number for a defense attorney in the area, but he told me that he'd heard of a lot of cases of people running this scam.
The defense attorney, while I'm sure he was just doing his job to the best of his abilities, only served to freak me out further. He started talking about what would and wouldn't be considered destruction of evidence, which made me think, "oh fuck, is he telling me to throw my hard drive in a lake as soon as I can? Am I fucked?" He assured me that he was absolutely not saying that. Which, I suppose, is what he would have said if he was saying that, but he was probably just trying to stop me from doing something stupid and catching extra charges.
I was genuinely considering killing myself if it turned out to be real, but I also recognized that it could be a scam. I was also lucky enough to have family in the area who I could talk about this to. If I didn't have accepting family members or friends, or I didn't feel like I could talk to them about this, or if I didn't have a lawyer to call who could plant that seed of it being a scam, I might have actually killed myself. I'm not at all surprised that this scam has taken lives. It's fucking terrifying to be on the other end of. One horny night of Grindr, and suddenly you think you're going to be labeled a pedophile and thrown in prison.
Thankfully, my story had a happy ending: the family members I talked to told me, "Yeah, this is an obvious scam. You're best off not responding and blocking him." By this time, the Grindr profile had already disappeared, so the clues that this had been a scam were piling up. Still, there was a period of time where it still kind of felt like the other shoe could drop, that the cops would come to my house and I'd be hauled off.
Again, I'm lucky; I got away with a couple days of terror and an intensified aversion to dating apps. The article talks about several cases where men killed themselves out of fear and guilt. I can't even express how terrible I feel for the families they left behind. They had someone they cared about ripped away from them, by random scumbags looking for a payday. Fuck the people who do this. If you want to get money by tricking people, there's less fucking dangerous ways of doing it.