Closure. You want closure? To do this, you must change your own mind from that of a victim to that of a survivor. Here are a few thoughts on how to do that.
To on-line scammed victims, closure is a bit different than crimes committed by someone in your own country. Your scammer will not get arrested by anyone, regardless of whether you know his real name or not. He is in a different country using a false name to scam you, and police interest and capacity deficits, and proof of the scam in addition to jurisdiction issues will prevent any arrests. You can expect to absolutely never get your money back once it's taken by an Internet thief. These facts you must accept and put behind you in order to move on with your life in a positive way. If you hold out hope for arrests or getting your money back it will only prolong the hurt and pain and prevent you from moving forward with your life.
Closure for Internet scam victims begins when you decide to drop all the fantasies he has placed in your head and post the details of the scammer here.
This helps you remove him from your life and also helps other victims of the same scammer, who has many more hooked at that moment. You must realize that you are not the only victim of him at that point in time or in the future and that posting his details can and does save others from falling to the same scammer. Your posts here can and do save real lives.
Closure is moving on with your life, and taking a bad experience and turning it into something good for yourself and others. Dwelling on any detail of the scam prevents you from doing this. Holding on to the "image fantasy," looking for the real person in the pictures, looking for the real scammer behind the scam, etc. will not do you any good and it will prolong the hurt and recovery time.
Moving from being a victim to being a survivor begins when you forgive yourself for making a mistake. You must realize that it is not your fault, but all the scammer's fault. He took advantage of you when you were most vulnerable.
Everyone makes mistakes, but you learn from them, and recovering from a scam and being a survivor is done by all of the members of this website with help from the others.
Your trust and love in others was deeply wounded by the lying scammer for his own advantage. Talking to the members of this website, posting your thoughts in your stories here, helping other victims recover by posting in our topics or by visiting the chatroom all help you to recover faster as a stronger person.
We see examples of it every day on our forums and hear it in our chatroom.
Your ability to trust and love again will be restored, but you will be more aware of the sociopathic criminals out there, who do not care about that.
Regardless of how long your stay is with us, we all hope that you will all take advantage of reading all of our informational topics, and some of the rest of our forum so that you can be armed with more knowledge of scammers and how they operate. This way, you can be protected from any more scams on yourself and you can also warn others about the dangers lurking out there on the Internet.
Scammers breed like cockroaches and are infecting every single social website, dating website, and chat website, in addition to their ages old email formats.
Read as much as you can here. Education is the biggest weapon against them, and you might just save someone else's life from a scammer someday. Our members do this daily, 24/7, 365.
This is the kind of closure you you will receive, and this will restore you.
The past scam is left behind. The person that you once were is past now.
You are changed and you are stronger. Some of our members have said that being scammed was one of the best things that ever happened to them. That it was somehow a gift to them for many different reasons. So, be optimistic.
You have your future ahead of you. Best wishes for you!