GRAPHIC -- SCAREY -- BUT PLEASE READ
Folks, I'm going to caution you again -- yeah, we got 'duped' -- and now we have Shannon saying it was her son.
Read that AGAIN. "now we have ... ***SAYING*** ..."
Do we believe all we read? I don't. Her Son? Her son and friends? Bored husband? Whatever ...
Like Gina, David and I met online. However -- I have seen it ALL. The good, the bad and the ugly.
Rather than a friend who also fell in love on line and met her and she was "nothing like" ... MY version of the story is a gay friend of mine who was "exclusive" with another gay woman for almost TWO years. One in Seatlle, one in Nova Scotia.
One night I talked to my friend on the phone (she was helping me with a computer issue) and I asked her if Leanna was .... (some benign question about whether her hair was dark or light or something).
"I don't know"
"HUH?? You two have gone together for TWO years ... surely you know what color hair she has!!"
"No ... we decided long ago that the physical wasn't important ... I've never seen her picture."
(Callie muttering there is something ROTTEN in Denmark .. or at least in Seatlle for crying out loud!!)
But I did tell her "Look, if you two are in love I can tell you this much for sure. It is NATURAL and NORMAL to want to have a mental picture that's accurate. The first thing David and I did was send something PHYSICAL -- a card, cookies, SOMETHING that my hands had touched to him and something from him to me. To not know a thing about how you look isn't ... NORMAL. So ... how does she sound on the phone ... surely you TALK, right?"
"No. It's ... expensive"
"Not once? Never?"
Ok ... fast forward 2-3 months. These two decided to jump in and LIVE together. (no pictures, no phone calls??)
The night before Leanna 'left' Nova Scotia ... she instant messaged Tonya. She thought MAYBE she should tell Tonya ...
Not 27. FORTY-THREE
and ... oh yeah ... name's not *really* Leanna. It's ... PATRICK.
Pathetic. Mean. Nasty.
I've seen worse. Like my best friend's neighbor who went to California from Binghamton, NY to be with her internet love. Except after she'd been there 24 hours she suddenly realized he wasn't a nice man at all and she was his PRISONER. He had her purse and wallet and wouldn't give them to her. He was keeping them 'safe'.
She climbed out of a bathroom window and dropped to the ground and got a friend via "collect call" to buy her a plane ticket home.
2 weeks later the cops are at this woman's door. They FOUND her license ... how? They were searching his house after they found his wife dead and in pieces in her car submerged in a lake in northern California. Found a lot of other women's licenses too -- were doing a door search to ascertain how many other women he may have offed. This was like 10 years ago.
I remember a couple who thot it was GREAT fun ... he trolled for lonely women to see if he could cause trouble in their marriages ... and she did the same with men. They did this TOGETHER, with a few beers and a ton of laughs. Several times they had people flying out to "meet" them ... people who never got met at the airport.
They did this for GRINS. To see how gullible people were.
Stuff happens. Because the internet CAN be a very anonymous place ... people can have fun ... or they can take advantage of others.
Be careful. I try to err on the side of caution. It cost ME nothing but time to respond kindly to this situation.
I've had another situation going on with someone emailing me for dog skin advice ... but it feels ... wrong. It feels ... like they could be a troll. So I'm being VERY careful. I have a big heart ... but I don't like being stupid.
If something sounds "too good to be true" it probably is. I began to get a really bad feeling about the Shannon thread after about page 3 and they stopped responding. The spelling errors bothered me but ... I didn't act on it. Because it didn't 'hurt' me.
Fool me once .. shame on you. Fool me twice? Shame on ME.
Just be careful. Proceed with caution.
When I look at a post and I 'wonder' if it's genuine, I go back and check other posts of theirs. Does the story hang together? Is that how they USUALLY are? Is it sensible?