romance scammer builds power plants

I met a guy on a dating service which I won't reveal his name yet as I am playing along with him. He sounded way to good to be true, his first e-mail he sounded wonderful,but I was skeptical. Then the 2nd one I could sense a language deficit (he says he was raised in Germany). He's widowed with a son a 3 dogs lives in Wisconsin. I googled part of the poem he sent and found others here he sounds like the same guy. The last email he sent he was leaving for Ghana to build his newest power plant and was using a multi function server so we wouldn't loose contact. I'm just looking for some advice on what to do? Can these people be caught? I would love to get him....for now I'm just playing his game. He will probably be asking me for $ tommorrow, so any advice anyone has is greatly appreciated.

The plot you are describing is definitely consistent with a scammer. Of course the real man will be from Ghana, the photos just pulled off the internet, and the romantic poetry, etc. copied from romance websites. The time before a money request can vary greatly from scammer to scammer, with some asking in a matter of days and others waiting months to a year or more.

All of the information given to you by the scammer is false. He is most likely working out of an internet cafe used by dozens to hundreds of other people. If he gave you any phone numbers, they will be redirect numbers or untraceable cellphones. The few investigations that are actually pursued generally involve losses of 10s of thousands to hundreds of thousand dollars. So realistically, the answer is no--he won't be caught.

I am assuming you were on the dating site searching for a real-life match. That would mean that this scammer has your personal information. What you are asking about (playing/stringing him along) is called scambaiting. We never recommend baiting someone who has your real life information. Some scammers will retaliate against baiters or victims who they believe strung them along by doing things to damage their reputation online. While it is highly unlikely they will ever physically come near you, they can actually cause quite a bit of a headache for you.

For this reason, we recommend posting the scammer's details--name, email address, phone numbers, and one of more of their scripted emails, but not pursuing baiting. For the future, if you are interested in pursuing baiting safely, visit our sister site, 419eater.com which is dedicated to scambaiting. You will find a tremendous amount of information there, and lots of people willing to help you learn how to bait well.

FYI, you will find that a lot of these scammers sound alike, and after a while, they all start to blur together! That's because the English idiosyncrasies and mistakes made by the different scammers are generally a result of differences between their language and English, and the way they learn English in western Africa. It is further complicated by the fact that scammers will share or steal each others' scam scripts. While it is very possible to identify western Africans based on writing style, it is virtually impossible to identify whether 2 characters are the same scammer unless there is a very distinct idiosyncrasy.