My sister is being scammed, dont know what to do

I believe my sister(45 yrs old) is being scammed. Says she met him playing a game on her phone,he says he was in the service, but now is a contractor with the government and travels all over the world. she has been in contact with him for only 6 months and has already broken up her family. He says he is in a high security job so they have never talked in person,only online. He says his name is Will (she wont reveal his last name to us) is rich and owns 2 houses, one in Chicago and I think the othe one is in St Louis where supposedly his sister lives and works for Anheuser Busch. When we found out about him, we tried to tell her he was a scammer so she started asking him questions and he had no answers because he cant say because of the security of his job, One day he supposedly got shot , which just happened to be the day, he was going to send her something. She says she has sent him no money, but I know she set up an account with Western Union and there are charges on her bank acct that just say Web. and when her husband questioned the lady at the bank, they dont know either where the money went. Also, she showed me a picture of him about a month ago, then showed her 21 year old daughter, who immediately recognized it to be a pic of Pat Tillman who is dead. He says he is 31 yrs old and has never been married, his dad died in January but he never came home for the funeral. She thinks that in another 6 months he is going to come to Kansas City for her and they will live happily ever after, Does this sound like anyone elses scammer?

It sounds like the general framework life story of a scammer. Scammers always have a lot of dead relatives, so that the intended victim always becomes the only one who can help - financially, and there usually follows a series of mishaps and accidents for which the scammer requires money. Prior to that the scammer has normally fallen into a very implausible romantic rapture, and I'm afraid that it's a very successful ploy.

When a victim has been well and truly hooked it can be incredibly difficult to make them see reality. It's almost like an addiction, as the person is hooked at a very deep psychological level. It may be that your advice and guidance is already not going to reach her, so may be you need to speak to someone you know she'll listen to, but they mustn't just tell her what she doesn't want to here, but listen to all she knows and then gradually go over a sensible course of action to at least stop her being bled dry of money - as that will be the scammer's aim.

No normal person asks a stranger from the internet to pay his debts. People have friends, work colleagues and relatives they'd ask for help. The fact he asks your sister first is the clearest indication that he's a scammer working from an internet cafe.

You have to work smart and might be able to use things like his claim to have been shot, by telling him it must be reported to the local US Embassy and that you can provide support through them. Of course the Embassy will have heard this story thousands of times, and if you get your sister to contact them she may listen to what they say.