Carlos Barragan

Thank you so much, Claire, for having me.

Yeah, exactly.

My mom met an American soldier on Tinder back in 2015.

And, you know, I'm very close to my mom.

She was a single mom back then.

I'm the youngest of three kids and I was 19 by then.

And when things started getting very weird and this guy said that he wanted to send some gold bars to my home in Madrid, I started looking at, I started investigating whether this was real or not.

And I tracked the IP email address and the guy who was supposed to be in Syria, because he said he was an American soldier,

Well, the guy was in Lagos, Nigeria.

And for my mom, it was a big surprise because I think that by then she was already in love with this guy.

And a long time passed.

And during the pandemic, I saw my mom struggling with loneliness.

And I kept thinking,

Who was the guy behind the scam?

Why did he do it?

How did he do it?

And most importantly, why my mom, someone who I deeply admired, had fallen for it.

So then I decided to go to Nigeria.

Well, that is a good question because many victims struggle to accept that they've been talking to a scammer and it took hard evidence.

So before showing the IP email address, I told her that this was a scam.