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Ruthless catfisher who conned four women out of $30,000 reveals the clever tricks to beware of, after one victim’s heartbreak caused the con man to turn his life upside down.
- Christopher Maxwell, 34, conned four women out of $30,000 over six years
- He is now reformed and shares his advice on what victims should be aware of.
- He said he would never be able to video call his victims while working in the military.
- I would ask them to send money to an account while I was deployed.
A reformed catfisher who stole $30,000 from four vulnerable women has revealed what victims need to be aware of and why he left his life of crime behind.
Christopher Maxwell, 34, from Nigeria, spent six years lying to women to steal thousands of dollars from them.
He targeted single women in the United States who were in their 50s and 60s, telling them he was a member of the US military.
It wasn’t until he conned a woman out of $20,000, causing her family to fall apart and her spiraling into depression, that she suddenly felt the need to come clean and change her ways.
“I told them I couldn’t video call because I was in the military and we couldn’t show where we were,” Maxwell told Daily Mail Australia.
Maxwell said his descent into scams began when he was in college, admitting he had a hard time dealing with the change of leaving home, so much so that he couldn’t always afford food.
Christopher Maxwell, 34, from Nigeria, spent six years lying to women to steal thousands of dollars from them. He now works for Social Catfish and helps potential victims know when they are going to be scammed.
“My freshman year was a little rough and by sophomore year I had saved a stranger’s photo from Instagram to my phone and started texting middle-aged women I met on Tinder,” she said.
The women were often divorced with children who had grown up and left home, making them vulnerable and easy targets for scammers.
“They just wanted a man who would love them for the rest of their lives,” Maxwell said.
One of his tricks was to tell the women that he was about to be sent abroad and would not have access to his bank account.
Instead, he would ask his victims to send him money to a separate account, and Mr. Maxwell said it was a couple hundred dollars at first, but he ended up pulling out thousands.
Of the four women he conned, all relationships eventually ended when Mr. Maxwell’s lies caught up with him.
His last victim was in 2021: an American woman he scammed out of $20,000 before she called him and refused to send him any more money.
“At some point she got depressed and her kids stopped talking to her because of me,” she said.
“I started to feel guilty and I video called her and told her that I had been scamming her.
‘She cried. I thought she was going to block me because what I did was so wrong, but she didn’t.
Maxwell said he told her he would promise to pay her back, but she refused.
He has yet to pay any of his victims back, but he insists that he will do so once he has made enough money.
Australians lost a whopping $324 million to online scammers in 2021 (file image)
“I regret doing it,” he said.
“I never had feelings for any of the women and felt no remorse until I met my latest victim.”
He said his family was unaware that he had been conning women, adding that when his victims questioned him about his Nigerian accent, Maxwell said that he had moved around a lot as a child because his father had also worked in the military. .
Maxwell now works for social catfisha company dedicated to the prevention of online scams through reverse lookup technology.
It comes after Australians lost a whopping $324 million to online scammers in 2021.
This was up from the $176 million lost the previous year.
The largest number of Australians scammed between 2019 and 2022 were those living in Canberra, followed by those in the Northern Territory, according to a recent study by Social Catfish.