Sarah, entrepreneur
- Love scam survivor
Sarah* wasn’t online to look for love, but when David entered her life via Twitter, he fit what she was looking for. But soon after they started living together, the idyllic romance took a wild turn.
In elaborate plots of political intrigue, royal schemes, terrorists and assassinations, for months, David kept Sarah living in a state of heightened anxiety. Until one day, the tables turned.
This is the story of a love scam and how the scammer finally got scammed as told to AIDILA RAZAK.
We met on Twitter (now known as X). I had been on Twitter for a while and David was one of the various random people who followed me on the platform. Like others, he would sometimes reply to my tweets.
I am from East Malaysia and back home, we have a specific dish made with a vegetable that is hard to find in the Klang Valley where I live. One day I tweeted about it.
He responded to tell me he knew where to find it in KL and offered to get me some. He tried connecting with me via DM but I wasn’t following him on Twitter so I didn’t get his message.
I have a small business. I share my company website on my profile so customers can find me. It was through my website that he sent the email about this vegetable and we connected via WhatsApp.
We started chatting more after that. David was from my hometown. He attended the secondary school opposite mine and he was six years older.
This meant we didn’t really have mutual school friends, but he mentioned some people I knew who attended his school. It seemed like we had common roots.
I learnt he grew up underprivileged and his parents were both in the police force. He lived in the police quarters near our schools. After SPM, he got a scholarship to study abroad from the state and it changed his life.
He told me he was in senior management at a well-known multinational oil and gas company. I tried to search for him on the company website but it only listed the top three in the management.
Our first meet-up was casual, but rushed. David said he needed to go back to our hometown after that to see his parents. Later, he tweeted a photo of a hawker centre there, so it matched what he said.
It wasn’t unusual for me to meet up with people I got to know online. I used to play an online game which required you to meet with people in real life to do tasks. So casual meet-ups were not strange for me.
We met up a few times after that and he was obviously interested in me but I wasn’t completely sure. It was only after about a month that we became a couple.
It may seem fast to some people but I was in my mid-thirties and he was in his early forties. I was just at that point in my life where I knew what I wanted in a partner and he fit the bill.
In fact, a few days before we officially became a couple, David started living with me. It wasn’t planned.
He said he wasn’t living at his condo because there was a bed bug infestation caused by a neighbour and he couldn’t stay with family in KL because they were in Covid-19 quarantine. So he booked himself a simple accommodation for a while.
I visited this place, which was near his condo, but it seemed pretty dodgy. He said he didn’t care because it was convenient. It matched the impression he gave of a down-to-earth guy who because of his upbringing never really got used to luxury.
“It’s just a place to sleep,” he told me, but it was so dire I suggested he just stay over at my place until everything got sorted.
Coincidentally, David was going to be on leave for two weeks. This was something he had mentioned before. He was to be on annual “audit leave” during a routine internal financial audit, so he wouldn’t have access to any documents.
It sounded reasonable to me at the time, but things started to get wild within a week of him moving in.
Although he was supposed to be on leave, he got phone calls from this office. From the calls, I got the impression his office was trying to locate something and he knew where they were. The conversations became more and more heated with each phone call.
Finally, he told me the audit found some RM8 million missing from the accounts and that it was traced to someone in his team.
In the next few days, David went to various enforcement agencies - the MACC, the police headquarters, the Commercial Crime Division building. I knew this because he was meticulous about updating me.
He sent me a pin drop on WhatsApp to show where he was and would text me the moment he got out as if to assure me he was safe. It was like he was worried something might happen to him during the investigation.
Because of this investigation, he said his condo was sealed and local bank accounts were frozen. But he claimed he had access to funds he stashed in offshore accounts via Singapore so he was okay. Soon enough, though, those funds were frozen. Still, he never asked me for money, at least not for himself.
Many weeks before that, he told me he was supporting a refugee family. He paid for their rent and occasionally treated the children to meals. Now that his accounts were frozen, the family was in the lurch.
What David gave them monthly wasn’t a lot - a few hundred ringgit. And I, too, wanted to help the family so I offered to give him the money for that month. He didn’t have to ask.
His phone conversations in the next few days were extremely heated. He told me it was the guys who were framing him. In these calls, he threatened to expose things about them.
He told me they wanted him out of the company because he had discovered a deal between the government and the multinational corporation which was not completely legal and involved kickbacks to a very senior politician’s family.
It wasn’t the first time he mentioned involvement with the rich and powerful.
Although David was a corporate man, he said he once served as some sort of civilian operative in a task force to combat piracy in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia. It was called Combined Task Force 151 (CTF-151).
He said it was not officially announced, but multinational shipping and oil and gas companies contributed personnel and resources to the task force because the piracy was hurting their business.
He said the company offered a large sum as compensation to those who volunteered to be seconded and at the time his brother had got into debt. He also had shooting training in school and had knowledge of firearms, so he offered himself.
David went into great detail about his role in the task force and what they did. He talked about having to kill people and the life and death situations. All in all, he painted himself as someone who had sacrificed himself for his company and country.
He said the government was fully aware of his role in the task force and since he returned to Malaysia he had also been asked to conduct training for security personnel.
Once, he said, after a full day of training in KL, he was going back to their room in the Marriott Hotel in Bukit Bintang when they encountered Johor crown prince Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim’s (TMJ) entourage and got into an altercation. But with his training, he managed to disarm the security guard.
This impressed the prince and they formed some sort of friendship. TMJ apparently bought him watches and invited him to the palace a few times. It seemed very friendly, but David would never say he was friends with the prince.
David never gave information all at once. It would be an anecdote here and there. An overheard phone call. It was all built up and recalled over time to paint a plausible image in my mind.
Most of the stories were based on something true, like the task force in the Gulf of Aden, which truly exists. There was also a Malaysian vessel, the Bunga Laurel, which was hijacked by pirates in the Gulf of Aden in 2011.
He would also reference real-life individuals and find connections which were real. For example, he said his lawyer was the brother of someone I knew from church. I knew that person but they had moved to the US by then and we weren’t in close contact. So he knew I wouldn’t contact her to ask.
Initially, it seemed plausible, but as the so-called financial fraud situation continued, it started to get even wilder. It went from company politics to somehow involving an assassination plot against a Sarawak politician. By then he had put me in such a state of panic and anxiety that I believed it all.
Before he moved in with me, he told me he had bought tickets for us to watch a musical - “Funny Girl” starring Lea Michele - in New York. I am obsessed with musicals and love “Funny Girl”. It was a dream come true. But now he was placed on a travel ban pending investigations.
The “Funny Girl” production was closing on Sept 3 and he had bought tickets for one of the last shows. It was August when the financial fraud situation happened so it was like the clock was ticking on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
David would go to the Immigration Department often - he sent me pin drops to prove this - apparently to find a way to get off the travel ban. I was panicking because all the travel was paid for.
Then he told me he had a solution. He said his lawyer was going to attend a state dinner and that they had a standing relationship with the prime minister. So his lawyer would try to pass the message to Anwar Ibrahim, to see if he could help.
At no point did I think to even check the immigration status myself on the Immigration Department website but he was basically creating this situation of panic and then offering a solution, so I followed his lead.
This is how the assassination plot came into the story.
A few days after the state dinner, I noticed that David was visibly upset, his eyes glistening to tears. When I asked what happened, the first thing he did was apologise because our long-term plan of moving back to our hometown to raise a family wouldn’t happen because of a decision he just made.
He told me he met with Anwar, and the PM said he could resolve this case against David if he did something in return - assassinate Sarawak premier Abang Johari Openg. Apparently, there was some dispute about Sarawak oil royalty and the PMX wanted Abang Jo out.
David said he refused. He said while he had killed others before, it was to save hostages, not to further someone’s political career. He was so upset, the indignance was incredible.
All this was also an incredible tale but at the back of my head, I was also thinking about the Ambank founder who was assassinated and how DPP Anthony Kevin Morais was found dead in a barrel of concrete.
Who would have thought either of them would be murdered in cold blood like that? So yes, it was really out of this world, but it wasn’t so difficult to believe.
After he refused Anwar’s offer, things escalated. Suddenly, he learnt that his lawyer was arrested for trumped-up reasons. The lawyer’s wife raised some money for bail, but they were just short of a few thousand ringgit. His lawyer’s partner - who represented him in court - was ethically bound not to post bail for his client.
David’s account was still frozen so he told me he would go to a community credit lender to raise the funds. He said he felt awful because the lawyer became collateral damage. Thinking of the high interest rates he would be slapped with, I lent him the money instead. After that, he told me two more lawyers got arrested.
By then two months had passed since the day he moved in and I had been living in this prolonged state of anxiety which became worse and worse. A month felt like 10 years.
Before all the drama started, I was planning to take a career break. As a small business owner, the lockdown period hit me hard so once the economy reopened, I worked very hard to rebuild my savings. Then my father died, and when I met David, I was still coping with grief.
When he offered to take us to New York for the play, I decided maybe it was time to take a break and reset. He also offered to support me for a while so I could just take time to rest and rebuild.
August was supposed to be a month for me to make some money before the break, but I could hardly do any work because of the anxiety.
Everything was happening in quick succession and at one point, he even made us live out of hotel rooms, claiming that our life was in danger. By that time, the New York trip was absolutely out of the picture.
At some point, while we were strategising for a way out, I remembered the story about his connection to TMJ and suggested he reach out to the Johor palace for help.
Of course, now, I feel like he had set this all up for me to walk into but it felt like my idea at the time. After some protest, David agreed to reach out to TMJ and to my relief, he said the prince agreed to help.
The help from the palace came in the form of an award. Apparently, to signal that he had the palace’s protection, the royal family would confer him an award, purportedly for his service in the Gulf of Aden. He showed me a letter indicating this.
All the while, his friends and lawyers were getting detained and we were raising funds to pay for bonds. But with this royal protection, at least we didn’t have to move around like fugitives. I felt myself relax more.
Somehow this created space in my head to see more clearly, and I started to grow more sceptical of his stories. I even started checking the law registry to see if the names of the lawyers he mentioned were real, and they all checked out.
As September was supposed to be my month of rest and rejuvenation, I had planned a trip with my extended family, supposedly for after we returned from New York. It was to Cherating and we were supposed to stay at the Club Med at David’s expense.
It was also a dream of mine to bring my family to visit an all-expenses-included resort, so when he offered I was thrilled.
The plan was for my mother, sister and her husband, my sister’s parents-in-law and an elderly aunt to fly into KL. We would then take a Club Med shuttle van to Cherating. My sister’s father-in-law was a dialysis patient, so she even planned where he could get his dialysis.
David was supposed to buy all the tickets but no flights were booked. Instead, he claimed the Johor palace offered to fly them all on a private plane. But as the date got closer, there was no confirmation so my family decided to buy the tickets themselves and flew to KL.
David was very stressed when this happened. But he checked them all into a hotel near KLCC and told them the van from Club Med would pick them up the next day, a day later than he promised. He made it out to be a misunderstanding.
That morning, as everyone waited for the shuttle van, he started to get call after call and finally, he told us we weren’t going to Cherating. The van was in an accident.
By this time, my sister and I were suspicious. We’re an enterprising family and we already had all these elderly people out here so we said: “No problem, we’ll rent a van.”
My sister also called Club Med and they told her there was no shuttle sent to KL on that day.
When we told him that, David was visibly upset. He started making phone calls and then told us there were apparently some miscommunications between Club Med’s Cherating and KL offices.
As we were arriving at Club Med, my sister wanted to call the hotel again to confirm our reservations and asked for the booking number. David claimed the booking was only for the next day and we should stay at another hotel in Cherating first.
Because of the shuttle mix-up, he said the hotel had unilaterally sent another shuttle for the next day and moved the booking accordingly. It didn’t make sense.
We booked a hotel down the road from Club Med so the elderly folk could rest. David, at that point, got more phone calls and told us he was told our Club Med bookings were apparently cancelled by the Pahang palace - through the Agong at the time, via PMX.
I wasn’t buying it. How petty would the PMX or the Pahang palace be to cancel a hotel booking for a family holiday over such a thing?
David also tried to convince my sister Club Med did not do walk-ins, so we wouldn’t even be able to go there to book a room. But my sister went ahead to call the hotel and sure enough, they had availability for the next few days.
To check into the Club Med, everyone had to produce their ICs but David couldn’t do so. He claimed he couldn’t find his wallet and probably dropped it at the other hotel. We went back to look for it to no avail. He said he would lodge a police report later.
We carried on with the vacation and pretended nothing was wrong. But I could tell David was desperate to keep up the lie.
In Club Med, he would be on his phone often and we would hear conversations referring to the police or the government and then suddenly he tells me he was instructed to take out then Sarawak governor Abdul Taib Mahmud. I remember thinking: “Get real!”
Worried about their safety, my family spoke to the Club Med manager to ask if anyone by David’s name or with the IC number he gave during check-in had ever stayed there. He claimed he was there in 2018. But they found no record.
I told my family if they wanted to leave they could but I wanted to stay and call him out on his lie. They stayed on.
That night we barely slept. He was on the phone to someone - a family member? - asking them to transfer the funds so he could buy the flight tickets for my family to return to our hometown. The line was patchy in the room so he went to the reception.
This was my opportunity to look for his IC. I searched his laptop bag, luggage, dirty clothes and then finally, his wallet fell out of a shoe. This wasn’t an accident. He hid it there on purpose.
His IC and driver’s licence showed his face, but his name wasn’t David. Different name, birth year, address, different everything. I felt my blood run cold like my entire being slipped away from my body.
My hands were shaking when I took pictures of his IC and driver’s licence on my phone. Then I carefully put everything back where they were and sent the photos to my sister.
The security manager at Club Med helped my sister contact the police and my brother-in-law slipped away to lodge a police report.
At the time, I had also Googled David’s real name. Among the first things that popped up was a long thread in the Low Yat online forum about him and all the women he had scammed. The worst thing was, I realised I had actually read that thread before.
The police ran his IC number and found there were multiple open investigations against him. They told us we should bring him in. To do this, we had to come up with a plan.
The tables had turned. If before he was the one feeding me information, this time, I was playing the role.
The entire Club Med booking was done under my sister’s name so she handled the arrangements for the shuttle back to KL.
We told him what time we had to go, and in the meantime, we arranged with Club Med to make a pit stop at the police station and told the police what time we would be there.
David was surprised when we reached the police station. My mother casually said it was so he could make a report over his lost IC. But I think he knew his time was up.
He got out of the van and the police officer asked him: “Eric Lee*?” He nodded and confirmed that was his name. He gave no resistance when they arrested him. They asked for his name again which he repeated “Eric Lee” and told police his real IC number.
I took out his bag from the van and put it in front of him. I broke down then. “How could you do this to me? You knew how hard I have been working,” I said. He said he was sorry.
Police handcuffed him and took him upstairs. Before he went up, he looked at me and said: “Take care of the cats and say sorry to your mum and sister.” They put him under remand.
I was assigned an investigating officer in KL, but it would be several days before she contacted me. When we finally spoke, she seemed unconvinced I was scammed. “But you willingly gave him the money right?” she asked.
She also asked for documents like bank accounts and statements, but within hours of receiving the documents, she sent a message to my lawyer saying the case had been classified as No Further Action (NFA).
I later found out she obtained CCTV footage of me at the bank with David/Eric, and this was seemingly proof that I was not coerced.
Officially, no reason was given for the NFA. My lawyer appealed to the Attorney-General’s Chambers and the review is ongoing. It is infuriating. I walked him straight to the police and now he’s free.
A couple of weeks after the Cherating trip, I received a text message saying my Shopee order had arrived. I didn’t order anything. It was a box of food items that I liked. Things he knew I liked.
It didn’t say it was from him, but I believe it was. Maybe it was his way to say he was sorry, that somewhere in between all the lies, he did care about me, that some part of our relationship was real.
In the end, it was not about the money.
It was how I had trusted him and also the promise that I saw in him. We had talked about moving back to our hometown and raising a family. There was that hope for the future that I had lost. That is the hardest.
Am I a lot more broke now? Yes. Am I destitute? No.
I can earn that money back.
Everything else is a lot harder.
*Editor’s Note: Scam survivors' names have been changed to respect their privacy and to avoid prevailing stigma against them. David/Eric’s name has also been changed pending formal charges against him.
If you feel that you may have been scammed, contact the National Scam Response Centre’s hotline at 997 for help.
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Published by Kini News Lab on Feb 26, 2024.
Kini News Lab
