Miltary scam

I've been communicating with someone who reckons he is in the military in Iraq, widowed with one son. Everything was going along fine, we were communicating through yahoo messenger and then he said that he would love to hear my voice and told me about how I can purchase a phone for him which would be totally refundable to me. He gave an email to write to and when they wrote back, the entire email looked suspicious because of all the broken English and bad spelling. I told him this and then a couple of days later , he gave me another email and when I got a reply back, it was basically the same email in some places except with more information and less bad english and spelling mistakes.

How do I know that this is a scam for sure, I'd hate to accuse and then lose something that may be wonderful.
The wording in the email is exactly as described on one of your emails here but is also exactly word for word from a legitimate web site, so I'm confused. Can we really purchase these for military personnel or is the whole thing a joke?

Welcome to Scamwarners. As he's asking for you to get him a phone, it's 100% scam. It's very common in military romance scams.
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=6527.
Can you give the email addresses and website address please. I don't see why a legitimate website should share the poor English and spelling mistakes of the emails you mentioned.

Welcome Ladybird,

As Arnold said, there is no doubt this is a scam. The military ensures that personnel have the ability to communicate with their loved ones. The entire "you have to buy your loved one a phone" scenario is an invention of scammers. It also amazes me how these scammers half their days on chat and email while claiming to be in a war zone. Soldiers stationed in war zones typically do not have hours of internet time available--and if they are in high security areas, they are not allowed to use chat programs like yahoo and MSN anyway! They would have to use the military's chat system, which they apply for and you don't pay for.

In addition:
-widower with one child--standard scammer character claim.
-poor English - standard African scammer
-if you look through his emails/messages, you will probably find he does things like uses terms of endearment--baby, honey, sweetie, etc--excessively.

Arnold has asked about the email, because he wants to see if there is a fake website that needs to be killed. Some scammers use fake websites to make their scams more believable. Some don't create websites, and simply chunks of text from real websites into their emails. They may even claim to be connected to the real website, but their email address is conveniently from a totally different domain. For example, many scammers like to impersonate ts2.pl . They may copy information from the real ts2 site, but instead of emailing [email protected] you are instructed to email [email protected] (or any other address).

If you could post this scammer's information--name, email address (or better yet, headers--extended headers from one of his emails may give us a true location), photos used, his early letters (these will be scripts that he reuses)--you can help prevent others being scammed. Then just drop him--don't reply to his emails, don't take phone calls from him--just cut off contact completely. Often scammers will continue to declare their love and proclaim their innocence, and it is tempting to believe that they wouldn't be so persistent if they weren't real. Unfortunately, it is not true. Scammers are sometimes unbelievably persistent once they have found someone they think they can get money from--you could have live video of the real person (who is a young African, not an American soldier) sitting at the computer typing his lies, and he would still be claiming that he is innocent!

Thank you for your prompt response guys.
I spent hours researching the internet, and low and behold, I found the pic of him used by the scammer, identified as such. I do feel sorry for the soldier, whose photo is being used in this manner. Is there anywhere official, that I can report this to, for the soldier's sake.
By the way, he used the name Sgt Gary Shipley of 75th brigade and he used the email [email protected] and the fictitious email address to order the sat phone was [email protected]

The article that appeared along with the bogus photot of the unknown soldiers is as follows

His id name was trueloving guy or something similar to it 50 year old man from los angeles, claimed he was in military and going to be retiring , said he fell in love with me and wanted me to have his personal belongings, and was going to send them here through diplomat, however the person behind the computer i believe to be tweneboah opoku from africa. through out the diplomats travels he went to ghana and got stuck there for customs reasons and needed money for an insurance cetificate and vip tags for this guy franks package i foolishly sent the mony to a total of 560 dollars because it seemed legitamate, to a supposed lawyer named tweneboah opoku.

then the diplomat flew to london and claim he got stuck there at airport again...i told him no way am i sending you any money. then told "frank" or who ever is on the other end of computer in africa to f*** off...he still claim he is real. what a scam. his email address is [email protected]. his messenger id is true soul, he also has a profile on woome.com as frank with a pict matching one of the ones that i have. also another profile used by this person is william james [email protected] who is the diplomat. he also has a profile on woo hoo under william. tweneboah opoku has a facebook profile and his email address that i was given is [email protected]


Hope this helps