Advert.

Do NOT tell your scammer he is posted here, or report their accounts as it puts others at risk!

Kevin Olsen - Hinge

This section deals specifically with online romance scams. The images used by the scammers are stolen from innocent people, usually from their social media pages.

Kevin Olsen - Hinge

Unread postby firefly » Fri Jan 17, 2020 9:01 pm

Form Submitted On: 2020-01-16 07:13:24

What name did the scammer use?: Kevin Olsen / Kev
What site/app did you first meet the scammer on?: Hinge UK. Scammer has deleted profiles he had
What email address(es) did the scammer use?: None - all contact was by WhatsApp using a UK mobile telephone number
What phone number(s) did the scammer use?: +44 7458 604723
Briefly explain what happened during the scam. : Scammer was very clever - he had me fooled for several weeks. Said he was originally from Denmark and the son of a diplomat and had lived in Namibia and the USA where he claimed he had an ex wife and a daughter. Said he owned a civil engineering company in London where he had lived for 5 years. Had several long phone calls with him - slight Scandinavian accent, seemed intelligent, a little shy and softly spoken. Said a few days after making first contact he had to oversee a project in Pretoria, South Africa, to build a bridge and access road and he would be gone for 4 weeks and could we stay in touch until he got back when we planned to meet for dinner. All fine for 3 weeks - swapped calls and text messages on WhatsApp - nothing suspicious. He came across as a really nice guy who was genuine and perfectly normal with no OTT flattery about me.

1 week before he was meant to fly home he disappeared for two days and I was worried. I sent message to ask if he was OK. He replied after a day saying he was just leaving hospital and there had been a terrible accident with a crane and three of his workmen were in ICU. He says he had been injured by being beaten up by an angry mob as he was the head of the company. Claimed vital documents in a briefcase were stolen during attack and he eventually says he needed £8,000 urgently as he needed a lawyer to get duplicated of original building licenses and permits. All sounded very plausible as he did not ask me directly for money - he was grooming me to get me to offer to help him. I only realized this when he made a couple of small mistakes about the technicalities if using an international money broker ( I lived abroad so knew all about using one unlike the vast majority of people ).

Discovered by a bizarre coincidence that he was using at least one other fake profile on Hinge again claiming to be Danish but with rurally different photos and details. Once he found out I knew he deleted both profiles stat and blocked me on WhatsApp.

Did not have time to get screenshots of original photos on profile he first contacted me on but these were definitely genuine and must have been stolen from a real person (did a reverse image search as soon as he contacted me and nothing came up) unlike the image in jacket and tie which is a photoshopped head onto a picture of someone called Antonio Mora (multiple Emmy Award winning journalist and television news anchor).

Image

I am well aware of romance scams and was in my guard right from the start but this scammer was incredibly good. There was nothing untoward and everything was understated if anything eg it took him a couple of weeks to say I sounded like a really lovely person. This guy is a real pro. Have reported him to Hinge but of course it is too late as he deleted his profiles whilst I was actually racing to report him.

I have been left very shaken and upset by this experience. I looked forward to meeting him and to our conversations and text exchanges.

Did you send any money to the scammer? If so, how much?: No, but said if he couldn’t get all the 8K he needed urgently I would maybe take it to his company’s lawyer in London once I had a legal signed loan agreement.

+447458604723
Number billable as mobile number
Country or destination United Kingdom
Original network provider* Hutchison 3G UK Ltd
Help yourself by helping others - report your scammer here.
Google can be your best friend;use it if you have doubts about someone met online. If someone met online only asks for money, no matter what reason, it´s 100% scam.
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=26504
Image
User avatar
firefly
"Nut job" admin.
 
Posts: 70956
Joined: Sun Apr 22, 2012 12:27 am
Location: in a parallel universe

Re: Kevin Olsen - Hinge

Unread postby firefly » Fri Jan 17, 2020 9:08 pm

Posted on behalf of the victim:

I only became suspicious a day or two before I found out for sure he was a scammer, when he said a few things about international money transfers using a money broker company such as Moneycorp. I actually lived overseas for a bit so unlike most people in the UK I know how these things work and 'Kevin' mentioned his broker deferring 'charges' which don't exist in international transfers.

I then went to the dating site Hinge that I had first met him on several weeks ago and saw that I couldn't view his profile any more (which means that I can't send you his original profile photos which incidentally I had done a reverse image search on as soon as he contacted me and that was negative). I then started scrolling through lots of profiles to try and find him and instead found a man calling himself 'Kev' with a different profile ie different age, height etc. and different pictures - but what struck me apart from the similarity with the name, was the fact that 'Kev' was claiming to come from Copenhagen just the same as 'Kevin' and I have never come across anybody on a dating site from Copenhagen in the year I have been using dating sites so it was unusual. I was immediately suspicious and sent him a nice message saying I was interested in his Danish heritage. A short while later he replied on the WhatsApp UK mobile number that 'Kevin' used asking why I had sent the message! Clearly he has so many scam profiles that momentarily he thought I was sending a message on the original profile he had used on Hinge and not a different one. He realized his mistake within minutes and deleted three messages he had sent me, the last one being 'Is there something the matter?'. Within a couple of minutes of that, the 'Kev' profile had disappeared from Hinge and he had blocked me on WhatsApp and then the phone number he was using was disabled. I suspect he knew the game was up.


Image

The story that 'Kevin' used was as follows :

Bio of 'Kevin'

His photos were those of a god-looking man in his early fifties, slim with a full head of light brown salt and pepper hair - one photo in a business suit that looked like a company photo, one with two girls in their late teens (he claimed one was his daughter), one of him sailing, one of him with another man skiing and one with four other men having a drink all wearing t-shirts. The photos matched his voice but I realize now were obviously stolen from a genuine person.

Height - 5ft 10in
Age - 52
Lives - Fulham, London
Works as a civil engineer with his own firm of 10 people in London
Father was a diplomat for Denmark and so 'Kevin' lived in Namibia and the USA where he met his ex-wife who lives with his daughter in California. He got US citizenship through his marriage to his wife.
Said he was looking to give up full-time work in his business and take time out to travel etc.

Scam

'Kevin' was so busy with work and then unwell so much so that he couldn't meet me before he left to fly from London to Pretoria in South Africa for four weeks where his company had engaged 200 local workmen to build a bridge and access road.

Everything going well and he was looking forward to our dinner date as soon as he got back on the 15th of January until he sent me a message saying he was going on site for the day and he liked that as it was exciting with the crane putting beams in etc. He disappeared after that and I got worried and sent a couple of messages asking if he was OK. After 3 days he sent a message saying he was leaving hospital. He claimed there was a terrible accident and the crane had dropped its load - 12 people injured and 3 in ICU. He was not injured in accident but he was badly beaten up by an angry mob of local people and his briefcase was stolen from his car which contained important papers. Claimed that the next day he had to surrender his passport to the police or be detained as they would not let him leave the country until a health and safety investigation into the accident (all standard practice as I checked). Claimed that his bank accounts had been blocked (he had mentioned problems with this a few weeks previously) and he had asked for help from the US Embassy in Pretoria who had given him a lawyer who would defer fees until the insurance claim was settled once the insurance company along with the authorities in SA had conducted an investigation. 'Kevin' said that he needed to find £8,000 urgently as he needed this to get duplicate document proving he had the necessary permissions and permits to be carrying out the engineering work in Pretoria. He was very clever in that he did not ask directly at all at first but instead said that he was making calls to people to get them to send him money as they knew he would return it when he was allowed to fly back from the UK and that he would 'figure it out'.

I was very suspicious but did not let on. If you have a company dealing in multi-million pound projects then £8,000 is chicken-feed and the idea that he could not raise that sum in hours from friends of family, was just not credible. I realize now he was grooming me for weeks so that I would be so desperate for him to be able to leave the country and come home and meet me, that I would offer to help. I really enjoyed our conversation and text message exchanges and had indeed built up a kind of bond with him and was quite upset when he told me about the 'accident' and his predicament. We had two long phone calls discussing what had happened and he was very credible and sounded traumatized and he expressed concern for those injured as well as fears that he would be take to court by the relatives of those people badly injured. He also expressed concern about the corruption in the police force and judiciary in SA and how he had to get out of the country.

I discovered that the £8,000 he claimed are needed after the ‘accident’ was exactly the maximum amount anybody in the UK could sent to SA by Western Union. Quite a coincidence that!!


Additional stolen pictures used:

Image
Image
Help yourself by helping others - report your scammer here.
Google can be your best friend;use it if you have doubts about someone met online. If someone met online only asks for money, no matter what reason, it´s 100% scam.
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=26504
Image
User avatar
firefly
"Nut job" admin.
 
Posts: 70956
Joined: Sun Apr 22, 2012 12:27 am
Location: in a parallel universe


Return to Romance scams.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 62 guests