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An Australian woman has revealed how scammers posing as TV star Alex O’Loughlin scammed her out of $37,000.
The 45-year-old woman, who used the pseudonym known as Sonia, said she was contacted in 2020 by a Twitter account with the same name as the 46-year-old Hawaii Five-0 star.
But the account was a fake, completely unknown to O’Loughlin, and the scammers used clever tricks to build a relationship with the woman and convince her she was genuine.
Catfish posing as actor Alex O’Loughlin (pictured) conned a woman out of thousands of dollars after she fell for the scam.
O’Loughlin in character from Hawaii Five-0 (left) as Steve McGarrett with co-star Scott Caan
The real O’Loughlin, who was born in Canberra, starred on the hit CBS show for the entire 10 seasons from 2010 to 2020 and resides in the US.
There is no suggestion that O’Loughlin is in any way connected to the scammers.
“I look back now and think how stupid I was,” said Sonia, from the country of New South Wales. 9news.com.au this week.
The scam started when she was contacted in November 2020, having mentioned in Twitter that he liked Hawaii Five-0 and followed some fan accounts of the show.
At first, he said the account seemed to be gauging its viewer’s perspective on the show.
“All the messages were about the show and what I liked about it, what I thought of the last two seasons and that kind of thing,” he said.
But eventually they asked him more personal questions about his life.
Initially skeptical, Sonia tested the person she was talking to by asking questions only O’Loughlin would know, such as her real name, which she said he knew immediately even though it was something you “really needed to look into.”
Their conversation, led by the scammer posing as O’Loughlin, moved from Twitter to WhatsApp and gradually turned flirtatious.
He told her that his marriage was in trouble and that he was considering a divorce and settling in Australia and that he was developing feelings for Sonia.
After a month of constant messages and around Christmas, the scammer said he bought her a gift and sent her photos of a $360,000 worth of item he claimed to have purchased from a New York jeweler.
The woman was sent photos of a piece of jewelry worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (pictured) that the scammers claimed they bought for her, but it never arrived.
Sonia said she was so flattered that she agreed to the $8,500 ‘customs fee’ to have the gift sent by private courier from abroad.
When it never arrived, Sonia became suspicious, but the scammer was very apologetic and convinced her that they had been scammed as well because the jewelry didn’t arrive.
He then offered to transfer her the cash amount the jewelry was worth to compensate her, but directed her to the website of Trust Universal Bank, a bogus institution.
When she asked him why he couldn’t just transfer the money directly into his own checking account, he said it would be too noticeable.
“He said he didn’t want his wife to find out because they had a joint account,” Sonia said.
So he created an account using his own identification documents, and soon after received an email saying that someone had deposited $502,560 into it.
By way of apology, the catfish posing as O’Loughlin offered to deposit the cash value of the jewelry into an account (pictured), but the website was fake and it was all part of the scheme.
He logged into his account through the website and sure enough, the money seemed to be there, but when he went to withdraw it, he was asked for a transfer code.
As part of the elaborate scheme, he discovered that the transfer code would require an $8,000 fee, which he paid, and then another transfer fee of $20,500.
When the system asked for another $12,000 in fees, he said he did some digging and found his logo was for Trust Bank with a slightly different name, a legitimate business he called and was told there was no record of his account.
She described the moment she realized it was all a scam as “like getting hit with a baseball bat.”
He added that he has since spoken with other victims of the same scam on the actor’s fan sites, some of whom have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
O’Loughlin’s Australian representative, US agent and lawyer are reportedly aware that the scam is circulating.