A Virginia woman says she was scammed out of $170,000 by a doctor she met on an online dating website.
Cassandra Drummond says she connected with Andrew Logan a man who said he doctor on BLK, a dating app marketed for Black singles in July 2021. Drummond believed she found a good match, however, ended up falling victim to a phishing scam instead.
“I just took a chance thinking he was a doctor. Maybe this was real,” Drummond told ABC 7 News.
Scammers use phishing schemes to disguise themselves as reputable companies through emails, digital messages and websites to obtain sensitive information or things they shouldn’t have access to, according to the FBI.
Drummond says majority of her life savings because of the scheme.
“Dr. Logan” told Drummond he was working at a medical camp in Yemen for the summer however, he lived in Michigan. The alleged Doctor had pictures on his BLK profile with a stethoscope and other photos of his family according to Atlanta Black Star.
After on talking on the phone and messaging for three months, he asked her to pay to ship items and cash to her home in Springfield, Virginia. Logan promised he would reimburse the costs when he came back to the states.
Logan used Elegant Freight and Courier LTD to send the package, he told Drummond, however, the package never arrived.
For two months, a shipping website displayed that the package was delayed. Drummond continuously spent money to clear the package in Yemen, Sudan, Portugal and Mexico, she told ABC 7 News.
She paid $52,000 to someone in Miami and thousands of dollars to a bank account in Charlotte, North Carolina.
At first glance, the website for Elegant Freight and Courier has a lot of glaring grammatical errors and incomplete sentences. Many of the website pages are blank including its landing and “Contact Us” page.
Drummond told ABC 7 News that the online chat was working and that’s where she complained about the delayed package. The local TV station says the company’s full address is also missing from the website and its phone number doesn’t work.
“If I could get my hands on him, I would just choke the crap out of him,” Drummond said.
Drummond says when it was time for Logan to return to Michigan, he ghosted her. She now plans to file a complaint with the FBI. She reported Logan’s profile to BLK, but as of now its unclear what the dating app has done to address the issue.
“There are some people in this world you can trust and like the one, I ran into online you can’t, and I just made a big mistake,” Drummond said.
