Frank Xie

The scammer approached me on a dating site (match.com), quickly closed his profile on the site and started our chat on WeChat (Chinese chatting App). He said he is ABC born in California (but he has heavy African accent…weird…he explained that he was raised in Barbados)…He showed up as a serious, professional electrical engineer who worked for Elantas Group for 14 years and just came to Beijing for 5 months as an expat to become the Head of APAC. However, after he came to Beijing, Elantas delayed his promotion. He was pissed off and started to find new opportunities. He flew to HK to pitch those investors and after few days of presentation & meeting, he was assigned a pilot project to cover 3 buildings engineering installation in Abu Dhabi. For this project, the company in Dubai transferred more than 310k USD into his personal bank account as a mobilization payment.

During the first 6 weeks, everything was perfect, and he seemed to be a sweet, nice and serious guy who cannot wait to be back to China. He emailed me every day (long romantic email), and checked on me morning/noon/night, and spent like an hour talking to me over WeChat. He claimed that he has never been married but has a kid. She is 7 and lives in North Dakota with her mom.

During the 7th week, he had his travel agent send him an email of flight ticket back to Shanghai, and kept me in the loop. He claimed that right after his pilot project in Abu Dhabi, he would be assigned more APAC projects and he could choose to relocate to Shanghai.

In the 9th week, his expense exceeded his bank limit. He seemed to be extremely worried and stressful since there is no branch of his American bank in Dubai. Then on the testing day which he said is vitally important to the whole project, two control boards got damaged and he needed to have them replaced immediately, the Supplier for such parts in China can combine it with another express shipment which is departing soon that day…. he needed RMB 69k (USD 10k) to be transferred instantly into the bank account he sent me….I said my bank also have daily limit for internet banking, then he asked me to help as much as I could. When I refused in the beginning, he got pissed off and challenged my trust in him and also said a lot of bad things. He also threatened me that he would change his flight and he would not be meeting me any more….as I was “cold-blooded” not helping him when he was in need (all bullshit stuff….)

I smell the rat!