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After losing her husband and enduring years of poor health, all Linda Dee Warden wanted was a friend. She signed up for a trial membership on a Latter-day Saint-oriented online dating service, trusting that shared faith would make reaching out safer.
Today, the 57-year-old Roy widow is out $5,670, tricked by a counterfeit love interest. On a fixed income, she is trying to borrow the money from her life insurance policy to make good on a bogus cashier's check her purported online companion cajoled her into processing.
"I feel foolish, now," said Warden on Friday. "He told me, 'You can trust me. This is all legitimate, and you know how much I care for you.' "
Warden fell for a new, especially cold version of the "Nigerian lottery scam," according to Francine Giani, executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce. In this case, a man using the alias "James Calvin Peters" claimed to be a divorced, LDS father of two engaged in the textile business.
Peters also said he was hearing impaired to explain why he wooed Warden solely via Internet text messaging. Having won her trust, he then asked her help in financing his alleged Florida company during a purported trading trip to Spain. He convinced her to open a bank account to which he sent her a fake cashier's check for $43,200.
Peters then asked her to deposit it and send the money to Nigeria via Western Union. When Warden did, Western Union told her she had been duped, but when she confronted Peters, he claimed ignorance of any scam and convinced her to wire money to three other locations.
Authorities intercepted some of the transactions, but Warden still was left owing $5,670, which could not be recovered.
"Although consumers have been warned about the Nigerian scam before, we wanted to share this woman's story to let the public know these scammers are looking for new ways to take your money," Giani said.
Warden said she was leery when he mentioned money at first.
"But he said he was [an LDS] convert," she said. "He always talked about God and everything. He knew my story, that after my husband died I had lost everything, was living [with family] and in dire straits."
Warden eventually filed a report with police. LDSPromise cut off the con artist's access to its site after learning of the scam and will cooperate with investigators, said marketing director Scott Johnson.
"We feel terrible about it. This is an awful thing for her to go through," he said. "But from our perspective, all we can do is education, to continue to warn and admonish our users to use good judgment. If anyone asks for money or anything like that, it should be a red light."
Johnson said LDSPromise's own internal investigation revealed that the man identifying himself as Peters had gone to extensive efforts to defeat layers of site security. He filled out the required 500 question compatibility test, and provided credit card and address information that initially checked out.
All the information turned out to be bogus. Further, Johnson found Peters had tried the same scam on other women using the site.
"Two other women, who had not fallen for the scam, reported him to us as well as [Warden]," Johnson said.
"We immediately banned him, even locking out his computer address."
Scammers routinely steal or counterfeit such "Internet Protocol" or IP addresses, however, so the information is unlikely to help authorities locate the perpetrator.
Giani said state investigators working with Western Union had traced checks written to three of Peters' apparent confederates, but the names they provided also were believed to be fake.
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