'I scammed the scammer' - Waterford man tracks down imposter with help of Kilkenny girl

A Waterford man has revealed how he "scammed the scammer" after someone hacked his Adverts.ie account and "sold" a festival ticket to a girl. 

Dean Robinson, who is a Broadcast Engineer and IT Technician, logged into his Adverts.ie account on a random Sunday and discovered back and forth messages with a girl from Kilkenny that he had not been messaging. 

"I was involved in a high profile scam situation," he explained before revealing the rest of the story.  

When he first tried to log in, he was unable to do so as it was saying the password was wrong. 

Eventually when he got into the account, he discovered the messages. 

The latest read: "I still haven't received the transfer Dean."

Originally, he thought he had forgot to send an item to someone but after seeing the back and forth messaging he realised the girl had been scammed.

The messages between the girl and the scammer had moved to WhatsApp, where he was pretending to be Dean. 

Because she had given her phone number, Dean decided to call her and let her know it wasn't him that she had been messaging. 

"I rang the girl twice that morning, no answer. I rang the girl twice that evening, I left the voicemail, and I left a text message explaining, you know, this is Dean Robinson. I'm the real Dean. I think you've been involved in a scam. Can you call me back?" he said.

The same evening she called back but was wary, wondering whether this was all still part of the scam. 

Dean explained that he saw the messages and explained how he worked for two radio stations in Waterford that are partners of the festival.

"We work at that festival. I had to make it very clear that it would have been actually quite detrimental to us. If you reported me to All Together Now, the lads that run the festival are going to ring me and go, 'What are you doing like?' Because they know me on a personal level," he said.

Dean eventually gained her trust and she proceeded to tell him that his identity had been cloned. 

The scammer had developed a relationship with the girl over six to eight hours explaining who he was and emailing her from two different Dean Robinson email accounts, while also messaging her via an Instagram profile. 

"They went as far as following her friends on Instagram and screenshot it and sent it to her to show that they had a mutual connection. This guy went on to her friends profile and her friends were at the festival last year. He said to that girl, 'We met those girls at that festival last year'," Dean said.

They also gave his home address and eircode to the girl to collect the tickets.

"They cloned my actual phone number and rang the girl from my actual phone number, and the girl thought they cloned my WhatsApp, so she basically unravelled all this to me," he said.

"I went, oh no, oh no, oh no. This is bad."

After investigating themselves, the two discovered that the scammer had cloned his number and hacked his Adverts.ie account, but everything else was created just to appear as if he was Dean. 

He created two fake email addresses and the Instagram profile as part of the scam. 

During their investigation, they found that the profile photo of the scammer on WhatsApp was actually him. 

He had video called the girl to prove that he was "legitimate".

It was after this that she transferred him to €220 on PayPal - another issue the girl faced. 

On PayPal, there are two ways to send money, one is for goods and services, and the other is to family and friends.

After building up trust with the scammer, the girl ended up choosing family and friends, meaning she had no protection from PayPal.

"If you send it as goods and services, there's what's called Buyer Protection, where PayPal can withdraw that money from the seller and get it back for you, because you're actually protected, and the seller takes a hit. He didn't want that," Dean said.

When the girl looked back on the transaction during her and Dean's deep-dive, she realised the money was sent to someone with the surname 'Maher' but Dean's surname is Robinson.

"As soon as the money hit, he blocked her on everything, deleted all the WhatsApp messages, which you can delete for everyone. The only contact that she had left was on Adverts. So that's how she sent the message to me. She went back on Adverts," he said. 

After the deep dive, Dean couldn't sleep that night so decided to go even further into investigating. 

"So in the profile picture that he had on WhatsApp, there's a menu in front of him. I was able to zoom in to see the menu."

Dean says having identified the premises from the menu he started going back through login activity through Adverts, which tracks the location that it was logged in from. It was logged at a location Dublin which is 22 minutes away from the restaurant.

"So we have a location, and we know where to get him," Dean said.

It turns out the scammer was also on Snapchat under his real name.

Dean also found him on Telegram, where he found that he was a 'crypto bro' and discovered loads of photos and information on him.

"He's still active. He's active on WhatsApp. His name was Dean, obviously on WhatsApp, then he moved to Ella, so he's pretending to be his partner in the WhatsApp profile picture. And now he's Mike," Dean said.

The next step was to contact the bank and PayPal. 

PayPal said she had no protection because she sent the money as family and friends and the bank said it was her own fault. 

The positive side of the story is that Dean was able to secure two tickets to All Together Now for the girl through the radio station. 

He did this to "make things right in the world again" and to prove to the scammer that he "picked the wrong person to clone".

"Now I'm watching him. I may have signed him up to a few telemarketing messages and stuff like that, and he's going to be wondering 'What's going on here? And his Tesco mobile account may have gotten a few forgotten password requests, and now he thinks he's getting hacked," Dean added.

"I suppose it's very hard for anyone to catch him when he's hiding behind this many identities. He is active on one phone number, but he may have many more and that's the scary thing," he said.

"I would love to raise awareness to everyone that this can happen to anyone, no matter how secure you are, and you need to think twice and three times before you send money to anyone. Question everything and only use reputable retailer websites," Dean said. 

"My advice to everyone is only deal through Ticketmaster, and that's All Together Now's advice as well. Don't buy third party because you cannot be guaranteed that you're going to get those tickets. If you're selling your tickets, you don't need to sell them privately. You can sell them back to Ticketmaster. Do not buy third party, or you will get caught up in something like this," he concluded.