A Toronto musician says he had to take matters into his own hands when a scammer tried to extort him on a dating app with intimate images he had shared online.
Rafael Kuerti, a Toronto-based cellist with the hip-hop group Babylon Warchild, said he encountered an alleged romance scammer, who he thought was a single girl in Toronto.
Kuerti had connected with the girl on the dating app Tinder and the two began chatting extensively over a two-day period, when she requested he add her on Facebook and Skype to continue the conversation.
"I'm pretty open online with my stuff," says Kuerti. "I'm a musician and a person that’s in the public eye already somewhat ... and if it is personal it's something that I’m willing to share with the world; I don’t care, I’m not too shy."
Kuerti said the girl put a significant amount of effort into their conversations and he genuinely believed she was who she purported to be.
"Then she was trying to be really scandalous," he said. "She was trying to get dirty talk out of me. She started saying 'Let's have some fun,' and 'Hey do you want to video chat? I’m really lonely right now.'”
Kuerti said he agreed to chat with her on Skype, where she immediately appeared before him naked and asked for him to do the same.
"I complied, I totally fell into it and I was an idiot and I fully pointed the camera at me and as soon as that happened, like literally five seconds later, the connection dropped."
Kuerti said he then received a call back on Skype and the person showed him that they were compiling a list of his entire Facebook friends list, all of his previous employers, his band and his family members and began composing emails to each of them.
"She posted all of my contacts and said 'I'm sending this video to every single person on this contact right now,' and she started to do it," he said, adding that the scammer immediately started asking for money as well.
Kuerti said all he could do at that point was laugh about the situation.
"[I said] I don't care, you can send this video to all of my friends, I don’t care those are my band members and truthfully I'm a musician and pretty much unemployed so I’m not going to lose my job over this," he said.
"I blocked her on Facebook and she was still threatening me and she kept on Skyping me and I just started hanging up on the calls."
Out of frustration, Kuerti said he turned to YouTube, where he discovered instructional videos on how to capture an IP address from Skype and soon learned that the person wasn't located in Toronto or even Canada at all.
Kuerti said within seconds he had access to an address in Manila, Philippines and sent a photo of the house to the scammer, before threatening to inform the police.
"As soon as I sent that she went off, she blocked me from everything."
Kuerti said that he never heard from the scammer again, but decided not to inform police of his investigation as he didn’t think they could help him.
Yet police in Ontario feel as though the perpetrator likely won't stop targeting victims unless a criminal investigation is completed.
"Well it certainly served in his purpose ... but if you were to do that portion of the investigation you could turn it over to the police because like I said you're not the only victim in this circumstance," said Det. Const. Ted Schendera of the OPP Anti-Rackets Branch.
Schendera said having a link to a specific country, city or even a building can allow Canadian investigators to work with local police through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty.
"Then we can work with the police agency of that city or country in order to actually get an end result," he said. "But I certainly don't want to go against what he has done because it certainly came to an end and it was positive for him."
Const. Victor Kwong of the Toronto Police Service said there have been numerous cases like Kuerti's reported in the city, but added that it's important to report these incidents to police, even if in this case Kuerti managed to fend off the scammer.
"It works, but you're not going to catch the guy," Kwong said. "He saved himself in that case but now this guy might just go to another computer and do the same thing to someone else."
In 2014 alone, there were 1,467 complaints in Canada of romance fraud where 998 victims were identified and their combined financial losses exceeded $13.9 million. That’s second only to wire fraud, according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
Although 95 per cent of all types of fraud are not reported, romance scams are particularly under-reported because they cause victims severe financial hardship and personal embarrassment, which reduces their likelihood of reporting the crime.
"Most of the time they are threats to see if the person will actually pay up. In these circumstances you need to report them right away, as embarrassing as it is," said Schendera.
"There's a lot of embarrassment that's actually used so we encourage the people to report them right away to the police because chances are that if you think it's only you that's being victimized, there are many other victims."
As for Kuerti, he said he learned a valuable lesson about personal privacy and added he won't be sending compromising pictures to anyone online ever again.
"It's not worth it. There's no reason for those to be existing – even if it is someone you trust or know, but especially if it’s someone you don’t."
