Roses don’t cut it when online dating experience turns out to be a scam | #lovescams | #military | #datingscams

Mark Handle was coming home at last. After yet another deployment to Afghanistan, the 58-year-old Army soldier was returning to Baltimore.

No one was more excited about this than Dede, a 60-year-old Montgomery County woman who’d met Mark five months earlier.

When I say “met,” I don’t mean in person. They’d met virtually, on Match.com, an online dating service. But right after Dede had reached out to Mark, he was ordered to Camp Rhino, 100 miles southwest of Kandahar. (I must point out that Dede is not her real name.)

As I outlined in Monday’s column, Dede had started communicating with Mark in late August, at first through Match’s messaging service, then, at Mark’s suggestion, via Yahoo Messenger. He sent her photos, too: casual shots in jeans and T-shirt as well as pictures of himself in uniform at military events.

In January, Mark wrote Dede that he was coming home and even sent a PDF file detailing his itinerary. (He was flying on Lufthansa from Kuwait to Germany to Baltimore.) He’d floated to Dede the idea of staying with her, but that wasn’t something she could agree to. Well, give me your address, Mark said, so I can find a hotel near you.

During one of their Yahoo Messenger chats not long before he was due to return, Mark raised something a bit odd. A box he was shipping home was unexpectedly held up in London. The contents were quite valuable and the insurance was expensive.

“He didn’t come out right away and say, ‘I need $12,000,’ ” Dede said. “He just said the insurance was going to cost $12,000 and he didn’t have it. I said, ‘That’s really a shame. I’m sorry I can’t help you.’ Then he just dropped it.”

A red flag? To Dede, it was more like a pink one.

“He didn’t press me for it,” she told me. “I didn’t feel threatened. That’s when the chocolate and flowers came.”

Mark sent a dozen and a half red roses and a box of candy to Dede’s home. “I hope this makes you smile,” read the note. “Can’t wait to see you soon. — Mark.” Later, he called her, but the phone connection was so staticky that Dede hung up.

In his next text message to Dede, Mark said he had found most of the money to ship the box (it supposedly contained diamonds). All he needed was $3,000. Could he count on her for it? He promised to pay her back.

“That’s when I knew it was a scam,” she said.

A long scam. “He e-mailed me for five months before he asked for anything,” Dede said.

She assumes he was stringing along multiple women, each at a different part of the seduction. She can imagine him sitting at the computer with a spreadsheet so he could keep the myriad details straight.

“He was so smooth,” Dede said. “He had this down pat. He had to have gotten money from women before.”

Dede is glad he didn’t get anything from her — and she even got 18 roses and a box of chocolates.

“He’s out that money,” she laughed. “It makes me feel good.”

Dede thinks online dating services should do more to screen out scammers, but she ignored many of the warnings that Match.com has on its site, including to be suspicious of anyone who asks to chat on an outside e-mail or messaging service, and to not share personal information such as phone numbers and addresses.

What particularly bothered Dede was the fact that her scammer draped himself in the patriotic mantle of the U.S. military, talking about his supposed service in Afghanistan.

I asked Dede to send me the correspondence between Mark and herself. She also forwarded me the photos he’d sent her. I did an image search on the photos and found a hit. The man with whom Dede thought she was corresponding — he of the salt-and-pepper hair and friendly smile — was closer than she knew. He worked at the Pentagon, where he was the Army’s top enlisted soldier.

The man in the photos knew that women all over the world were falling in love with him and he wished he could do something to stop it.

Tomorrow: Stolen photos, broken hearts.

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.