Queenslander Chyrel Muzic has lost $40,000 to an internet love scammer. It was $40,000 she didn’t have. Over two years, she borrowed the money, taking out a personal loan and going to Cash Converters. But she doesn’t sound as angry as you might expect.
“I don’t even really hate the scammer or anything,” Muzic said on the ABC’s Four Corners this week. “I’m not kidding you. He has been the most beautiful person that God ever put breath into.”
The Four Corners report into West African cybercrime has exposed a sad truth. There are lots of single middle-aged Australian women out there who want someone to make them feel special. They want it so badly that they’re prepared to ignore suspicious signs and agree to suspicious requests for money.
Because, like Muzic, they’ve found love with a ruggedly handsome American military man. Or, at least, that’s what they believe.
Muzic spent two years thinking she was having an online relationship with US Colonel Bryan Denny. In fact, the person who strung her along for all that time was a 29-year-old Nigerian man.
“I was totally in love with him, totally besotted,” she says. “I’d never loved anyone like I loved him.
“I thought all my dreams had come true.”
Each week Bryan Denny is contacted by women from around the world who have fallen in love with him and, in some cases, emptied their bank accounts for him: https://t.co/110ykJkXu2 #4Corners pic.twitter.com/zRQBU9lyOI
— 4corners (@4corners) February 11, 2019
Top Comments
How brave Ms Muzic is to share her story, if this makes others in the same circumstances stop and save themselves the same anguish, that will be brilliant.
It's gotten to the point now where there is so much information out there about how these scammers operate and about how we shouldn't be sending money to people we have never met in person that I struggle to muster up sympathy for these women.
I think that's a little harsh.
They were in love, or at least thought they were.
One of my friends almost got caught by something like this, she saw through it eventually and didn't send any money.
She showed me some of the messages, the guy was very charming.
I'm sure he had enough practice.