The man on the phone had a south-New Jersey accent, the gift of the gab, and a low-key alpha male edge. He introduced himself as Pat, and said he was looking for love in his late forties.
Pam Schmidt, a legally blind 46-year-old from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, met the mystery suitor through the phone dating service Quest Personals in 2014. She thought he seemed sweet, with an inquisitive charm.
During their first conversation, Pat told her he valued personality over physical appearance. No need to wear makeup, he said, inner beauty shines the brightest. He asked questions about her life, and listened intently.
“What’s a typical day like for you?” he wanted to know. “What are your hobbies? Where would you like to travel?”
When the subject turned to him, he described his beach house on the Jersey shore and his private plane, and suggested taking her on a trip someday. They talked for more than three hours, with Schmidt opening up about her weight loss battle and feelings of loneliness. She hung up feeling cautiously optimistic.
“He smooth-talked his way into my heart. He knew how to pull heart strings,” Schmidt, now 54, told me recently. “It seemed like he genuinely wanted to get to know me.”
But when Pat called her back a few days later, alarm bells went off. “He said he was jogging and $400 fell out of his pocket,” she said. When he asked her to wire him money, “It was like, ding, ding—red flag.”
Schmidt told Pat she lived on disability checks and couldn’t afford to lend him cash. “He said, ‘I accept you for who you are, why won’t you help me?’” But she hesitated and, “then he got angry.”
She ultimately refused to send him money, and reported the man, later identified as Patrick Giblin, to the Department of Justice. They knew him well.
Over the past three decades, scores of other women have fallen for his shrewd, psychologically astute love fraud schemes.
“He’s a smoothie, let me tell you.”
The pudgy, persuasive college dropout may be America’s most prolific romance scammer—allegedly swindling at least 155 women out of more than $500,000, according to cops, prosecutors and victims. The Daily Beast tallied the previously unreported number from court documents, press releases and newspaper clippings.
Giblin, now 58, has been sent to prison at least four times for the con—and has escaped federal custody twice. Both times, he committed the crime while on the lam, including as the pandemic stalled in-person dating.
In July, the deceptive Don Juan pleaded guilty to wire fraud in his most recent case. After decades of mostly slaps on the wrist, he now faces up to 25 years behind bars at his sentencing next month.
In a phone call from federal prison, Giblin told me he conned the women “to support my degenerate gambling habit.” He insisted that he deserves another chance at rehabilitation, and vowed to ban himself from casinos for life.
Schmidt’s not buying it. “He should be in prison for the rest of his life,” she said. “He’s a career criminal and a sociopath. If he gets out, he’s going to do it again.”
Long before the “The Tinder Swindler,” Richard Scott Smith or phony Nigerian princes, there was Patrick Giblin.
Giblin is an early pioneer of the “boyfriend scam,” which is now among the fastest growing crimes in the U.S. Last year, Americans reported losing $1 billion to romance scammers, according to the FBI. By contrast, the agency reported just $50 million lost annually a decade before that.
“It’s a words game,” said Kathy Waters, co-founder of the non-profit Advocating Against Romance Scammers. “Words of affirmation—for a lot of victims, that’s their love language.”
“These guys will sit there and listen for hours about a victim’s life, and they’re just gathering information, that’s how they pull them in,” she said. “It’s sick what they do.”
Giblin is rare because he works alone from inside the U.S., Waters said. She has never heard of a single person committing more romance scams than him. (A search of past media reports also yielded no one individual who has been caught doing more love cons.)
“I know where you live. I know where you work. You don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Over the past three decades, authorities say his scheme has gone like this: Find a single woman via a personal ad, singles chat line or internet dating service. Woo her with conversation designed to sniff out her personal fears and empathies. Then use a double-whammy of charm and pressure to convince her to wire money, ranging from $250 to $50,000 per victim.
Giblin is a master manipulator who has made a fortune spinning tailor-made tall tales—and weaponizing the emotional weak spots of women, according to prosecutors from past and current cases.
He’s creative and borderline compulsive about the scheme, previously keeping meticulous logs with notes on dozens of victims, according to prosecutors. Once he’d determined a woman “ready” to be scammed, he’d allegedly make a mark next to her name.
The long-game Lothario has posed as a law enforcement officer, the son of a prominent judge, a big winner at Casino, and a state lottery worker, according to prosecutors. Other times he played the role of a wealthy guy who’s simply down on his luck.
He has swindled heartbroken widows, single moms, and women with disabilities, according to authorities. Others were recently divorced, had been laid off or were grieving the deaths of sons or fathers.
They have ranged in age from 20 to 60 years old in at least 15 states including Texas, Ohio and New York—and as far away as the United Kingdom and Canada, according to police and prosecutors.
Giblin was first arrested for conning women in 1989, long before “romance scam” was even a term. That year, he was charged with convincing at least 10 women in New York to run up large credit card bills for him then never repaying them, the Albany Daily Gazette reported decades ago. (The outcome and details of that case were unclear.)
In the following years, he racked up more than 30 convictions, largely for petty theft, along with a sexual assault in 1990, according to court records.
Giblin soon graduated from small-time crook to full-time fraudster. In 1995, he allegedly persuaded at least two victims to wire him money at a casino, and was busted targeting at least one more woman in 1997, police said.
“He’s a smoothie, let me tell you,” Detective Sgt. Ray Milham, who worked the case, told the Albany Times Union. He served nine months in jail for grand larceny in 1997.
“‘You’re a crook,’ the judge fired back.”
Once free, Giblin was quickly back to the same hustle. During a three-month period in 2001, he bilked $31,000 from 20 women nationwide after meeting them through a telephone dating service, according to police.
And those were just the victims willing to speak up. “[Some] were so embarrassed, even though they’re out a substantial amount of money, they don’t want to come forward,’’ Milham said.
In one of those cases, Giblin told a 52-year-old faux love interest he’d hit the jackpot at a casino and needed to borrow cash to pay taxes on it. In another, he charmed a 50-year-old lady from Guilderland, New York, into loaning him money to fix his car. He disappeared with all the cash.
In June 2001, police tracked him to an Atlantic City casino and “he was arrested right at the poker table as a fugitive,” Guilderland Detective Sgt. William Ward said. He was 36 years old, living in a trailer with a woman in nearby Queensbury, New York.
Giblin pleaded guilty to two counts of grand larceny and ultimately blamed the crimes on his gambling addiction.
“I’m not a violent person,” he told Judge Thomas Breslin at his sentencing hearing in November 2001. “I’m a person who’s done stupid things to support my habit.”
He promised to pay back his victims and vowed to get treatment. Breslin sentenced him to the six months he’d already served and probation.
But within months, he was back at it—this time conning more women than ever.
Carolyn Corcoran first spoke to Giblin in October 2003 after a hellish year. The Houston, Texas mother had recently lost her only child in a head-on car wreck, had been laid off from work and was helping her father cope with terminal cancer.
Giblin, whom she met through Quest Personals, told her he’d gotten a job in the Lone Star State and planned to move to her area, Corcoran later testified in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey. During a heart-to-heart, she mentioned a $20,000 payout she’d received from her late son’s life insurance policy.
Giblin soon claimed to be on the road heading to Houston, then called to report the tires on his SUV had blown out. He asked to borrow money for new ones and promised to pay her back when he arrived, she testified. She waited with anticipation but he never showed up.
A few weeks later, he called claiming he’d been arrested and asked for bail money, according to Corcoran. She agreed to help—but when she reached a $400 ATM withdrawal limit, Giblin instructed her to pull a grift of her own.
With an air of self-assured authority, he ordered her to buy a TV at Walmart with her debit card then return it at another Walmart for cash. When Corcoran drew the line, Giblin flew into a rage, she said.
He threatened to “knock off” her ailing father if she didn’t come up with the money, and she believed he was capable of it, she testified. Corcoran eventually sold her car and gave him the cash.
In total, Giblin took $18,000 from Corcoran, leaving her penniless. She had to borrow money for rent and couldn’t afford to buy food, she said.
“Prison workers accompanied him to the airport and watched him get on the plane, but he never showed up in Newark.”
Corcoran was one of at least 100 women Giblin swindled out of $400,000 from between 2000 and 2005 by posing as a potential boyfriend, federal prosecutors said. There was…
