Tasmanian single mum Amanda* didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation from the man, who called himself Mohammed, after also spotting him under the “people you may know” section of her own Facebook page.
“He was attractive and cute, I thought, ‘Okay, why not’,” Amanda told 9news.com.au.
At the beginning, their conversations were innocuous enough.
“It was just normal chat, ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you today?’ that kind of thing,” she said.
But, pretty soon it turned into something more.
“We were getting along really well. We had this kind of chemistry,” she said.
“Soon we were chatting every day – day and night, really.”
Mohammed told Amanda he was a cryptocurrency trader living in Washington.
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He was prolific, sending messages and photo updates of his day, along with flowery declarations of his love.
Early on in their online relationship, Mohammed made a video call to Amanda, so they could speak in person.
In the video, he appeared exactly as he did in his photos.
“I was looking at him and talking to him – it was him,” Amanda said.
It would take Amanda six months to unravel a devastating truth – that nothing she thought she knew about their relationship was real – but not before she had been…
