Hello fellow survivors,
First of all I am really happy that this forum exists! Thank you all very much for helping and understanding without judging!
I don't want to talk to my friends about what happened because it embarrasses me, so I have to write it down here. I have to tell somebody, for my own peace of mind.
I was scammed last Friday on chatrandom. Until then I never even thought about something like that could happen to me and as I was presented with a video of myself I was shocked and feeling helpless for a couple of minutes, as most of you can tell.
"She" came straight to the topic. Giving a fake reason she stopped the video transmission after about five minutes.
I gave "her" my Skype name and email address but not my Facebook though I was asked for it several times.
Pretending not to remember the Skype password we ended up at gmail chat, where she asked me about personal details. The questions made me suspicious, but I ignored that feeling unfortunately… Luckily I didn't have my full name or anything personal saved in my Skype account or gmail address.
All I gave away was my hometown, my age and my first name, so nothing more showed up in the video title. I had sent a picture earlier though, which I myself ran through google image search later and which didn't give any results back.
She had uploaded the video to youtube, showing my face and later my open trousers but never both at the same time. I flagged it right away and it was almost instantaneously removed!
I was told to send money via Western Union, roundabout 200$, to an account in morocco and promised the video would be deleted and I should hurry as "she" wanted to leave, getting impatient and insulting.
The scammer said, the video would be spread across Facebook and various other sites where it would accumulate money by getting clicks… (Do such sites even exist?)
In my initial panic, and due to her constant flow of messages, I actually registered to WU and was preparing the transfer!
While trying to find out if the scammer would get my real name by making that payment and changing my Facebook picture and reviewing privacy settings for Facebook and Skype at the same time, the rational thinking finally kicked in, halfway at least, which made me close the WU website before transferring any funds.
Roundabout half an hour had passed since the video was uploaded and I finally decided to cut the line, deleted my Skype account and my gmail address!
My last message was something like, I noted all your accounts, chat logs and IP address, which I now think might had been not the wisest statement, fearing of having him upset and made him even look harder for my personal details…
What followed was an evening full of paranoia, reviewing my privacy settings over and over again and feeling very stupid! About an hour later I finally had the idea to google the scammers fake name, which led me straight to this amazing forum.
I spent almost the entire weekend renaming accounts, closing down every profile to the highest privacy level possible, or even deleting them entirely and creating google alerts for everything that could point to me.
I searched for the fake name of the fake girl as well as for the name of the money recipient on Facebook and blocked every entry I found that was even close to these names.
I deactivated my Facebook the day after the incident just to be safe there, created another completely anonymous account and searched for my own name to make sure I am not discoverable.
The thought that he might be still searching for me makes me feel bad mentally and even physically from time to time when I think about it, though I am probably totally overreacting.
There's really no way left he could get in contact with me, right?
But there's still the fear that he might have found my profile before I closed it down, but then again, he could only be guessing that this was me, as I never mentioned my last name…
My friend list was always hidden but not the people that liked my cover photos for example. Did you know that there's no way to make cover photos on Facebook private? The only way is to delete them and leave that space blank.
I know it is unlikely but there's still the chance that he found my Facebook appearance by searching my first name and hometown, but if he did, he would have told me, wouldn't he?
As you may notice the paranoia is still not entirely gone
Reading through this forum helps me but it still gives it me a horrible feeling thinking about what could have happened and that it might not be over yet and there is this constant uncertainty if I am really on the safe side now…
Anyway, I've done a lot of reading about getting rid of your "digital footprint" and in fact I managed to remove it almost entirely, including raising removal requests through the google webmaster tools.
I guess it's almost impossible to make all your traces vanish (after all we're living in the digital age and I made use of that extensively) but I will gladly offer my assistance with what I learned during the last days if anybody needs help!!
Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think!
Let's get through this all together on our way to closure!
Finally, there is one huge positive aspect about being a scam survivor which we probably all have in common:
It makes us more aware of what we do and what we share in this, in that regard hostile world of the internet. Don't make yourselves vulnerable!
I really start to believe, that we all can learn something good out of this… I think I did!
Thank you for reading! Cheers!
PS: I've submitted all details that I remembered about my scammer through the report form.