A cautionary tale about a Facebook romance scam and ‘catfishing’

Trust your gut. Get a German Shepherd. And set a pair of very large men’s work boots outside your front door.

That’s the advice Dr. Ann Burgess, the focus of the 2024 three-part Hulu docuseries, Mastermind: To Think Like A Killer, has for other women to help keep them physically safe. But what about staying emotionally – and financially – safe? Almost any woman who has participated in online dating has at least one “horror” story of dating life.

According to a 2023 report by Pew, 48% of women 50+ who have used online dating sites or apps have encountered a scammer. Unfortunately, many include being “catfished,” the online scam of pretending to be someone the catfisher is not with the ultimate goal of defrauding unsuspecting victims (mostly women).

A cautionary tale

Author Joan Mellen, 83, renowned for her meticulous research into and books on JFK’s assassination, and a controversial book about basketball coach Bob Knight, seemed an unlikely candidate to be the target of a catfisher, but in 2023 that’s the situation in which she found herself. Rather than allowing embarrassment and shame to silence her, Mellen fought back by publicly sharing her experience in her 2024 memoir, Sherlock Being Catfished (TrineDay), a cautionary tale in which she detailed how women (and men, for that matter) can guard their hearts, minds – and bank accounts.

After a 50 year teaching career, culminating as a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, Mellen said, “When I retired, things changed.” Without the routine and structure of teaching, and upon the completion of what she calls her “last real book,” she lost her sense of purpose and, to an extent, her identity.

“I looked at things that I would never have looked at in the past and one of those things was Facebook,” she said, calling it “a real enemy of the people.”

She came across old, unanswered messages, most of which were inquiries about her work. Then, one day, someone purporting to be a man named Michael Devlin sent her a message. He claimed to be working on a logging job in Cuba. (Being employed abroad is a classic sign of a catfisher because it enables the person to claim intermittent Internet and cell service and it’s also a plausible excuse to delay meeting in person.)

Trust your intuition

Inexplicably, Mellen was intrigued, but suspicious. She responded anyway, writing in her book, “I had no idea of the price of such an adventure.” Despite frequently feeling uneasy, Mellen continued communicating with the catfisher and, while the conversation may have begun as idle curiosity, she quickly became emotionally invested, calling it “self-induced hypnosis.”

“You want somebody that you can put your head on their shoulder, and you want somebody that you can talk to and tell things, and that you can share [your] life with.”

Those desires made it easier to ignore the red flags: excessive flattery and instant familiarity (imagine your reaction to a stranger on the street referring to you as “Sunshine”), poor grammar and sentence structure indicative of a non-native English speaker (“If I were younger, I would have hated every grammatical error”), and, within the month, the inevitable request for money – $15,000 in this case. Alerted by safety protocols, her banker intervened, and it was never sent.

“It’s a miracle I didn’t send the money,” Mellen said. “Not one cent.” She’s one of the fortunate few. According to Federal Trade Commission data, Americans lost $1.14 billion to romance scams in 2023.

If you’re contemplating (or already participating in) online dating, tell a trusted friend or family member or even a younger acquaintance, who might be more tech savvy or familiar with social media, particularly dating sites and apps. As Mellen pointed out, it was her research assistant, Audrey – a millennial – who alerted her that she was being catfished. “I had never heard of it,” Mellen admitted.

Joan Mellen book cover; photo courtesy of Courtesy of Trine Day

Psychological origins

Even after learning the truth, if you find yourself unable to let go of the fantasy – Mellen said she would still like to meet her catfisher, “if he actually exists” – there may be deeper issues that you want to explore with a therapist, as the vulnerability to a catfisher often has psychological origins.

Part of the reason Mellen was susceptible to the lure of the catfisher, she explained, was because, “I really feel I had this terrible childhood.” She said she still carried the psychological scars of the abuse she was subjected to by her father, and advised people to look back on their own life and be aware of why they might be easy prey for a catfisher.

“I thought I was so smart,” Mellen said. “I was a college professor and an author – and it didn’t do me any good because there was a need. You learn things about yourself when something like this happens.” And, while she hoped readers of her book would see the absurdity and even humor in the situation, she said, “Actually, I’m not over it.”

[Note: Sadly, Joan Mellen passed away this summer, and was eulogized in the New York Times. She leaves behind the legacy of her work.]