This quite literally all just happened. As in I ended my conversation with them less than 20 minutes ago and I’m still absolutely fucking reeling from it. I met this person on a dating app, they were really nice, not super pushy, we seemed to share a lot of common interests. Things kept developing for weeks. Two days from now would have made a month actually. We shared personal stories, or at least I did I don’t know about them at this point. We exchanged photos. Including ones that seemed to help verify identities. It was going fantastic. I was feeling great, better than I’ve felt since I was a teenager. We started talking about maybe meeting up. We’re a decent distance from eachother, or at least that’s what I was told. But the distance wasn’t so great as to be insurmountable. We discussed meeting up in a city between the two of us. That’s where things went downhill.

First they asked me to pay for the hotel, which I was totally fine with doing. I wasn’t fine with sending them the money through cashapp to pay for said hotel. That’s when they started acting kind of funky and alarm bells started going off for me. They eventually dropped that and said I could book the hotel myself if that would make me feel better. Then they said they totally forgot they didn’t have money for gas. I said I wasn’t comfortable sending them money before we had met. And they started trying to guilt trip me about it. Anyways I was already feeling super hurt at this point because the options were either A, they were scamming me, or B they weren’t at all the person I thought they were. I eventually told them I could pay for gas, I just needed to video call with them first to set my mind at ease. That’s when they started making excuses. “The camera on their phone was broken”, so they couldn’t video call. Convenient considering they had just sent me a photo supposedly taken the day before but I was still really hoping I was just being paranoid at this point. So I suggested they ask their roommate to use their phone really quickly. Just 5 minutes was all I needed to make myself feel better about this. They still wouldn’t do it. They kept asking why I wouldn’t trust them, saying they only needed 50$ for gas. That’s when I really started to give up hope that it wasn’t a scam. But I was so desperate to believe them. I finally broke down and basically laid out all my cards on the table. I told them I was bipolar which we had yet to discuss as I wasn’t really sure how to approach that topic. I told them that I just couldn’t take the chance I had been scammed and that finding that out would probably crush me. I told them that if I actually got scammed like this it would send me spiraling and I was terrified of losing all the progress I had made over the last few years. I told them all of that, I basically opened up my heart and put it on a plate. They responded by saying “So you won’t pay for my gas?”

Anyways I’m in fucking shambles. I liked them, or I guess I liked the person they were pretending to be. I thought there was really something there, and for the first time in years I let myself hope that maybe just maybe I was worthy of someone else’s love. I don’t know how to move on from this, and I’m still just baffled by the fact someone would do this for a couple hundred dollars.

TLDR Been building my confidence up to try and start dating again and after weeks of talking with someone to try and make a connection it turned out they were playing a long con to scam me.