Nobody falls for the obvious version.

It started under a photograph she had posted of a hiking trail. He had walked the same ridge, or said he had. They talked about nothing for three weeks: knees, weather, a dog he used to have. He asked questions and remembered the answers, which almost nobody does.

They moved to WhatsApp in the second week, because the app kept logging him out. He worked offshore on survey contracts, so the video calls that did happen were short and bad, and the ones that did not happen were always for a reason she could see was reasonable.

The first request was not for money. It was that she not mention him to her daughter yet, because the last time he had introduced someone early it had gone badly and he wanted to protect what they had. She agreed, because it sounded like care.

Month seven was a customs bond on equipment he needed to finish the contract. He was embarrassed to ask and said so twice. She sent it. Then there was a second fee to release the first, and by then the money already spent was itself the reason to send more.

They met in a group chat about index funds. She was not looking for a relationship and he did not offer one for a long time — that came later, slowly, and it was almost incidental to the friendship.

The platform looked professional. It had a licence number in the footer, a mobile app, and a support chat that answered within a minute. Her first deposit was small and the returns were plausible rather than absurd, which is why she believed them.

Then she withdrew. The money arrived in her account within a day, and that single event did more than every other part of the operation combined: it converted a cautious person into a confident one. She moved a substantial part of her savings across in the following six weeks.

The account showed steady growth for another month. When she tried to withdraw again there was a tax clearance to settle first, payable from outside the platform, and the support chat that had answered within a minute began taking days.

He noticed because she mentioned a name three times in a fortnight and had never mentioned him before. His first instinct was to say she was being conned, and he came very close to sending exactly that message.

What he sent instead was that he had been reading about this and it had worried him, and would she mind telling him about the man. She did, at length, and enjoyed telling it.

He asked whether they had video called. She said the camera on his laptop was broken. He said nothing about it at all, and asked what the man did for work.

Three days later she raised it herself: it was strange about the camera, wasn't it. He agreed that it was a bit strange. That was the whole intervention.

It was fast, which is itself the signal: warmth, flirtation and a video call within three days. She suggested moving to a private app, and then suggested something else, and he agreed.

The screen recording arrived the next morning with a list of his colleagues attached and a figure. He paid it. A second demand came within the day, larger, because paying had told them what he was worth.

He stopped replying, blocked the account, and spent the following three weeks in a state he describes as waiting. Nothing was ever published.

He did not report it for a month, and only then because a friend made him. The delay is the most ordinary part of the story.