Bob Sullivan
I sat down at his table and he had probably 100 cards and letters and gifts and boxes and he said, ‘I bet there’s at least 500 …. This isn’t nearly all of it.’ And he really lost count. There were just stacks of love letters and gifts and cards, and it just… the emotional power of sitting at his kitchen table that was just covered in evidence from women who believed that they were in love with him. — ABC News reporter Lisa Fletcher
Cards. Flowers. Candy. Gifts that just never stop. It might sound quaint at first, even charming. But every one of these love stories ended the same. With Pat Marsh pleading for the sender to stop. Sometimes, that conversation happens at his front door…with anger and even violence hovering in the air.
“These people have also come to my house….And this is where it gets dangerous,” he told me for a recent episode of The Perfect Scam, the podcast I host for AARP.
“After about 6 months of this, one night… There was a knock at my door…and I was looking at a guy and he was like… ‘you told me to come over.’ and I was like, “Dude, get outta here.” And that’s when he grabbed the door and he opened the door and tried to come in… and my exact words were, ‘You’re playing a dangerous game. You need to get out of here.’ .. I would have shot him, if he had come into my house, I have shot him.”
“These people” are romance scam victims. And the parade of victims who call, write and visit Pat Marsh has been relentless for nearly a decade. Marsh is a test pilot, a generally fascinating man who caught the attention of criminals back in 2017. They thought he’d make perfect bait for would-be lovers on dating sites, and by all accounts, the criminals were right.
Marsh is the victim of a particularly cruel kind of identity theft. No one can really say how many women and men have been enchanted by the fake Pat Marsh and various variations. But here’s a hint: One police detective investigating a Pat Marsh romance scam in Easley, South Carolina – a widow who’d had $600,000 stolen — used email records to find 60 more cases.
Marsh is really the victim of industrial-scale crime, says Detective Eric Gillespie.
“The fake Pat Marsh here is actually probably a dozen if not more people,” he told me. “You’ve got professional outfits in West Africa and Southeast Asia that you might have 100 people who are the same person more or less, for lack of a better phrase.”
Even if you don’t believe you could ever be the victim of an online scam — and I think you are foolish for that — you should care about the surge in digital crime. Pat Marsh is collateral damage in the ongoing international scam wars we are all fighting. You can be next. All of us can get wrapped up in a scam even if we never communicate with a criminal. That’s why these stories matter so much.
After a decade’s worth of investigations, TV news stories, and late-night door knocks, Marsh has no idea when his headaches will end. He really has no control over it. Instead, an entire system needs to be changed. Online dating sites need to police their membership much more aggressively. Banks and new money systems need to get better at policing suspicious transactions. And we all need to be more sympathetic about the isolation and boredom that create fertile ground for crime.
I hope you’ll listen to this two-part episode about the man with 1,000 fake lovers. If podcasts aren’t your thing, you can find a transcript here.