As told by Kathryn Price:

This is my own fault. In 2004 I hired a guy from India to build a website for me. After he was finished building my website he told me he could help me make money by driving traffic to my website.

All I had to pay him was $5000 for a 6-month contract. I agreed. He did what he promised he would do. I made $150,000 off the website in the first year, $250,000 the year after that. So when I was contacted by the same guy 6 months ago telling me he was looking for investors for a big social networking project that was projected to generate 10 million in profit in its first five years, and how he thought of me and wanted to give me an opportunity to get in at $10000 for 10% share of projected profit, I believed, based on some of the emails I’d exchanged with him during the time he was building the site and then marketing it for me, that he genuinely just wanted to give me an opportunity because he remembered how I’d shared with him that I was always on the lookout for a promising start-up to invest in.

I asked for some information about the project and he sent me a professionally done, highly impressive Power-point presentation detailing his plans for the project. I was not only impressed, I was excited about the whole idea. I got back to him right away and asked if I could sign on for a 30% profit share. He told me I was lucky because two of his investors had contacted him saying they couldn’t raise the funds they’d promised to invest so he would go ahead and sell me the 10% shares of profit he was going to sell them.

Never imagining for a moment that I was being scammed, I happily wired $30,000 to a bank account in Texas. He told me he was using the bank account of a relative residing in Texas because it was easier than having the funds sent to his bank in India. I thought nothing of it.

Days after I sent the money I had heard nothing back from him to let me know the funds had been received by his relative in Texas. I emailed him asking him to verify receipt. I did not receive an email back. I emailed again the next day and the day after that. For a full week I kept sending emails; then it started to dawn on me that I might have been scammed. I contacted my bank. They said there was nothing they could do since I’d sent the money voluntarily. It hadn’t technically been stolen. Refusing to accept that answer I went in physically to the bank. They told me the same story, but after I broke down in hysterics the manager agreed to see if there was anything they could do. They picked up the phone and called the bank in Texas, but they learned that the account I wired the money to had been closed 3 days after the money was withdrawn.

There was nothing the banks could do. They told me I would have to go to the police. To this day I haven’t gotten my money back or been able to track down the programmer in India or his relative in Texas.