I sat down at his table and he had probably 100 cards and letters and gifts and boxes and he said, ‘I bet there’s at least 500 …. This isn’t nearly all of it.’ And he really lost count. There were just stacks of love letters and gifts and cards, and it just… the emotional power of sitting at his kitchen table that was just covered in evidence from women who believed that they were in love with him. — ABC News reporter Lisa Fletcher
Cards. Flowers. Candy. Gifts that just never stop. It might sound quaint at first, even charming. But every one of these love stories ended the same. With Pat Marsh pleading for the sender to stop. Sometimes, that conversation happens at his front door…with anger and even violence hovering in the air.
“These people have also come to my house….And this is where it gets dangerous,” he told me for this week’s two-part episode of The Perfect Scam.
“After about 6 months of this, one night… There was a knock at my door…and I was looking at a guy and he was like… ‘you told me to come over.’ and I was like, “Dude, get outta here.” And that’s when he grabbed the door and he opened the door and tried to come in… and my exact words were, ‘You’re playing a dangerous game. You need to get out of here.’ .. I would have shot him, if he had come into my house, I have shot him.”
“These people” are romance scam victims. And the parade of victims who call, write and visit Pat Marsh has been relentless for nearly a decade. Marsh is a test pilot, a generally fascinating man who caught the attention of criminals back in 2017. They thought he’d make perfect bait for would-be lovers on dating sites, and by all accounts, the criminals were right.
Marsh is the victim of a particularly cruel kind of identity theft. No one can really say how many women and men have been enchanted by the fake Pat Marsh and various variations. But here’s a hint: One police detective investigating a Pat Marsh romance scam in Easley, South Carolina – a widow who’d had $600,000 stolen — used email records to find 60 more cases.
Marsh is really the victim of industrial-scale crime, says Detective Eric Gillespie.
“The fake Pat Marsh here is actually probably a dozen if not more people,” he told me. “You’ve got professional outfits in West Africa and Southeast Asia that you might have 100 people who are the same person more or less, for lack of a better phrase.”
Even if you don’t believe you could ever be the victim of an online scam — and I think you are foolish for that — you should care about the surge in digital crime. Pat Marsh is collateral damage in the ongoing international scam wars we are all fighting. You can be next. All of us can get wrapped up in a scam even if we never communicate with a criminal. That’s why these stories matter so much.
After a decade’s worth of investigations, TV news stories, and late-night door knocks, Marsh has no idea when his headaches will end. He really has no control over it. Instead, an entire system needs to be changed. Online dating sites need to police their membership much more aggressively. Banks and new money systems need to get better at policing suspicious transactions. And we all need to be more sympathetic about the isolation and boredom that create fertile ground for crime.
I hope you’ll listen to this week’s two-part episode about the man with 1,000 fake lovers. If podcasts aren’t your thing, I’ve pasted a partial transcript below.
———————–Partial Transcript———————-
[00:01:15] Pat Marsh: My dad was a three-war Navy fighter pilot guy. Started in World War II, then Korea and Vietnam. He is one of the founding pilots of Top Gun.
[00:01:24] Bob: And obviously you got the flight, flying bug, right?
[00:01:27] Pat Marsh: Yeah, I was too late to fly Tomcats in the Navy, but I was a natural. I’m as comfortable upside-down as I am sitting here talking to you.
[00:01:34] Bob: That’s probably useful for what’s been happening to you then.
[00:01:40] Bob: That’s Pat Marsh I’m talking to there. And what’s happening to him is, well, that’s a story, such a story it’ll take up to two episodes to tell it. So get comfortable while we explain how Pat Marsh’s life has been turned upside down, and why his story reveals why everyone needs to care about scams and fraud because even if you never directly encounter a criminal online, well they can steal from you too and they can steal a lot more than money
…
[00:11:11] Bob: Tell me the first time or whatever you remember about the first time you get an inkling that any of this was going on.
[00:11:17] Pat Marsh: Oh, I was actually on a job and I got a call on my cellphone, and the person on the other line was a woman and she was, what’s the word I’m looking for, kind of hesitant, unsure of herself. And she goes, “Is this Pat Marsh?” And I said, “Yes.” I didn’t recognize her. I wasn’t volunteering anything. And she’s, “You and me have been talking for a number of months.” And I said, “I don’t recognize your voice. I don’t know who you are.” And in a real short order it, basically we got to the point that she said that me and her had a relationship, and we had been talking, and it was time for us to meet, and this and that and the other. And basically my response was, “I don’t know who you are. I’ve never spoken to you before. We definitely don’t have a relationship.”
[00:12:08] Bob: It’s 2017. The woman is an attorney in Pittsburgh.
[00:12:14] Pat Marsh: They were supposed to meet and then this clown came up with some, oh the airplane’s broken, I’m stuck in an airport. I lost my passport. Can you send me $5000. And I think that’s when she said I need to check this out. Because you know when the person she thought was me started asking for money on, on some BS excuse.
[00:12:36] Bob: The woman thanks Pat. He hangs up the phone and doesn’t think too much more about it. But…
[00:12:42] Pat Marsh: Within a day or two I got another call, and this was from a professor at MIT.
[00:12:49] Bob: Oh God.
[00:12:50] Pat Marsh: Same story. She thought she was having a relationship with me. She was doing her due diligence. And I’m like, wow, a professor from MIT, and an attorney from Pittsburgh. And then in real short order I started getting cards and other calls and that’s when I knew I’ve got a problem here.
[00:13:12] Bob: Cards, calls, flowers. Suddenly his home is deluged in romantic things from people, mostly women, he doesn’t know. Roses, treats, even a box of lingerie.
[00:13:26] Bob: Now when this first happened, had you heard of romance scams before?
[00:13:30] Pat Marsh: No. And in fact, like I told my, I’ve never even been to a dating website before. I just, I was never even out of curiosity on one. I’m just, it’s something that doesn’t interest me.
[00:13:40] Bob: So at what point do you go google romance scams, or when do you figure out what’s really happening?
[00:13:44] Pat Marsh: I didn’t. It, I, I knew a reporter down here. We were doing another story on a plane crash. He always calls me whenever there’s a plane crash because he, of my background and he wants to know what kind of the inside track is, and things about how these things are investigated and what do I think the cause was, just shooting from the hip, things like that. And we were doing something and I mentioned that I was having this problem. And he said, “Hey, I’m going to go to Lisa Fletcher, who’s our investigative reporter. She would love to do a story on this.” By then I had received dozens and dozens of cards, flowers, candy from all these imaginary girlfriends.
[00:14:28] Bob: Pat turns to Lisa, a real reporter for ABC News in Washington DC, to ask about all these imaginary girlfriends.
[00:14:37] Lisa Fletcher: A colleague said you should talk to this guy. He’s got this crazy scam that’s happening around him in a dating website, and there’s a million scam stories, and I thought, oh, another scam, dating scam. I’ll call him up.
[00:14:50] Bob: Pat, she quickly learns, is a stunt pilot, a funny guy, with a very well, not funny story.
[00:14:58] Lisa Fletcher: And he was the most interesting guy, right. He’s a fighter jet pilot in airshows, and he’s rugged, and he’s handsome, and he’s just very, he’s very outspoken, and he’s just, he’s very interesting. He’s one of those very charismatic, compelling personalities. And he’s, so you’ve got that, right. You’ve got that tough guy exterior. But then he says, women, somebody’s been using my identity, my image, my name, my photographs, everything about my life; posting it on dating websites that are geared toward older women, and then scamming them. And he’s like, all of a sudden, he’s like that exterior started to melt, right, and this tough guy started telling me how his heart was breaking for these women. And he was getting gifts and letters, and phone calls, and he had saved all of them, and methodically was going through each one with a letter he’d written back to them saying, I’m not this person you think I am. So when he started telling me this, I’m like, I’ve got to see this. I’ve got to go out to your house and, and I went out to his house and…
[00:16:14] Bob: So Lisa takes a camera crew to Pat’s home and it’s even worse than she imagined.
[00:16:21] Lisa Fletcher: I remember when I sat down at his table and he had probably 100 cards and letters and gifts and boxes and he said, “I bet there’s at least 500.” He said, “This isn’t nearly all of it.” He said, “This is just some of it.” And he really lost count.
[00:16:38] Bob: Do you remember what it felt like when he had this table full of letters and cards and gifts?
[00:16:43] Lisa Fletcher: Yeah, I was wondering what I was getting into. I had the phone call, and we got to his house and sitting down at the table there were just stacks of love letters and gifts and cards, and it just, the emotional power of sitting at his kitchen table that was just covered in evidence from women who believed that they were in love with him. I really could feel what he was feeling and what he communicated to me on the phone, how difficult this was, how heartbreaking this was, how this was so much more and so much bigger than one scam that affected one individual.
[00:17:18] Bob: And what is Pat doing with all those cards and letters? Basically what he tried to do for Pam. He tries to save these victims.
[00:17:28] Pat Marsh: And then I had like a, a form letter, and I would just change the name, and I would send it back to that person, that woman with her card so she could see that it was genuine. And just saying, hey, you’re a victim of a sweetheart scam, call the cops or call the FBI.
[00:17:47] Bob: But many of these warnings don’t arrive in time.
[00:17:51] Pat Marsh: But a lot of them like that it’s too late. They told me they sent them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then I got to the point where you know every time one of these women would like, I sent him $25,000, I sent him, one of them sent him $1.2 million by the way.
[00:18:06] Bob: Wow, my God.
[00:18:07] Pat Marsh: Entire life savings.
[00:18:09] Bob: That’s horrible.
[00:18:11] Bob: And often by the time they find the real Pat Marsh, they’ve already discovered there is a problem, and they’re angry.
[00:18:20] Pat Marsh: And it’s too late, and the reason they’re all mad is they every, they sent whatever they sent, and once they, there was no feedback, no bounce back, they wanted their money back. They wanted their return, and it wasn’t forthcoming. And all of the sudden they said, let me call this Pat Marsh and see what’s going on. And obviously they came to me and that’s when they got the bad news that you’re being scammed. You were scammed.
[00:18:47] Bob: But by the time they find you, they’re already suspicious, they’re already angry, right?
[00:18:51] Pat Marsh: Yeah, they’re getting angry because they lost their money.
[00:18:54] Bob: And some of these angry people, they do more than call.
[00:18:59] Pat Marsh: But these people have also come to my house.
[00:19:02] Bob: Oh God.
[00:19:02] Pat Marsh: This is where it gets dangerous.
[00:19:04] Bob: Oh my God. Wow.
[00:19:05] Pat Marsh: After about 6 months of this, one night, it was like on a weekend night, I was up late. There was a knock at my door. And I looked through the window and I was looking at a guy, and I opened up the door and I was like, what the hell? And he swore that me and him were having a conversation and he was like, I was like, “Dude, I don’t know who you are. I’m not talking to you.” “Yeah, we just talked, you told me to come over.” And I was like, “No, I didn’t. I don’t know who the hell you are.” And he was really insistent. And I actually had my gun on me, and I had it behind my back. I mean he was really being forceful, and I was like, “Dude, get outta here.” And that’s when he grabbed the door and he opened the door and trying to come in. And that’s when I took a couple of steps back, I let him see the gun then, and my exact words is, “You’re playing a dangerous game. You need to get out of here.” And that’s when he realized I wasn’t the guy he was talking to.
[00:19:57] Bob: Wow.
[00:19:59] Pat Marsh: I would have shot him, he had come into my house, I’d a shot him.
[00:20:02] Bob: And this isn’t the only time one of these lovers had come to his home.
[00:20:08] Bob: How, how many people, just roughly, have come to your house like that?
[00:20:11] Pat Marsh: Oh, it’ll, a dozen would be a nice round figure.
[00:20:14] Bob: You’ve had a dozen people ring your doorbell and say I’m your online lover.
[00:20:17] Pat Marsh: Yeah. Lately they’ve come with a whole bundle of like paperwork. Um, oh God this, I had a woman come to my house just this last fall. As I pulled up, I saw this strange car sitting in my driveway, and I’ve got a long driveway, and I knew instinctively what it was. So I pulled up behind the car and this elderly woman gets out with a whole handful of papers, and I just kind of like cut her off, and says, “I’m not that guy.” She was coming to check. She had been sending this person a lot of money, and I don’t know how much, but she said it was a lot.
[00:20:54] Bob: Well you must be so fed up with this.
[00:20:56] Pat Marsh: Yeah. But I’ve had women some to my door and they’ll bring their daughters or their kids with them.
[00:21:02] Bob: Oh God.
[00:21:03] Pat Marsh: And one time this daughter, probably, I don’t know, in her 30s or 40s, she’s screaming at me from the car. She won’t get out of the car, her mom’s standing on my doorstep, and we’re talking, and I’m telling her what’s going on; she’s a victim of a romance scam, and I’m not that guy. But her daughter is screaming from the car, and I don’t remember the exact words, but it was basically, “You stole my mom’s money, give us our money back!” Just screaming at me that I ripped off her mother and that I needed to return the money.
[00:21:34] Bob: Not all the visitors are quite so angry at him anyway.
[00:21:39] Pat Marsh: One of the ones that came in my driveway and she had a bunch of paperwork with her, and she came in my driveway knowing that I think what was going to happen as far as she was going to meet this illusive Pat Marsh, he was probably going to tell her, nope, not me. You, your money’s gone, and sure as heck, that’s what happened, and, and then I don’t remember the exact words, but when I thought we were all settled, then she wanted me to go out, she asked if I would go out to dinner with her.
[00:22:08] Bob: (chuckles) That’s a pretty good plot for a romantic comedy movie.
[00:22:12] Pat Marsh: Ah, I don’t know about that.
[00:22:13] Bob: So Lisa Fletcher, after seeing all these cards and gifts and hearing about everything else, goes on television and tells Pat’s story.
[00:22:23] Lisa Fletcher: Yeah, so we did the interview with Pat. We obviously looked at all of the cards and the letters and the gifts, talked to him about what was going on. Talked to some experts on these dating scams. Talked to the FBI. And then tried to reach the dating websites to talk to them about it, because I think that’s one of the big questions and that was part of our original storytelling on this was what, if any, responsibility do these dating sites have?
[00:22:48] Bob: Did they ever respond back then?
[00:22:51] Lisa Fletcher: I don’t recall if they, I know that they wouldn’t sit down for an interview with us. And I think that they, their position is we can’t safeguard every single individual on our site. Everybody is an adult. They have to take a certain degree of precaution and understand that sometimes people aren’t who they say they are. But I think there are a lot of people who would disagree with that.
[00:23:14] Bob: So that leaves Pat without any real option to get control over this situation.
[00:23:20] Lisa Fletcher: Pat is a victim, but he was also a first responder to the other victims. So that ery uniquely positioned him, right, because he didn’t lose money, but his life was deeply disrupted. Because you imagine, like you have strangers believing that you stole their life savings, that you manipulated them emotionally, that you ruined their retirement, and so he had a very large, emotional toll that was being taken on him in addition to the victims who were, in some cases, having their life savings pulled out from under them.
…
Lisa’s story comes out on television which you might think would be the end of it.
[00:28:20] Bob: So after the story came out back 9 years ago, did this stuff ebb and flow? Did it wind down for a while?
[00:28:25] Pat Marsh: No, it kept on going strong. ‘Cause the story came out in November, and I always got the cards around birthday time and holiday time. So I got a bunch that Christmas, and I got a bunch the next year during the birthday time, because they had my birthday too.
[00:28:42] Bob: Oh God.
[00:28:43] Pat Marsh: Which I just, I can’t… and I got to the point where as fast as I got them, I, for a long time I would just, I would get the card, and then I had like a, a form letter and I, I would just change the name, and I would send it back to the, that person, that woman with her card so she could see that it was genuine, and just saying, “Hey, you’re a victim of a sweetheart scam, call the cops or call the FBI or go look at Lisa Fletcher’s story, but we don’t know each other.”
[00:29:15] Bob: But even that doesn’t deter the fake Pat Marsh, something that victim Pam Dodds confirmed a few years later. And again, we don’t recommend this.
[00:29:25] Pam Dodds: It was probably three years afterwards. I thought, huh, I wonder. And I called he hone number I had. And he answered.
[00:29:35] Bob: Wow! Wow!
[00:29:36] Pam Dodds: So he’s still doing this.
[00:29:38] Bob: Oh my gosh. Did you talk to him?
[00:29:41] Pam Dodds: Yeah, I did.
[00:29:44] Bob: What did you say?
[00:29:45] Pam Dodds: Oh, I asked him. “What are you doing? You’re still doing this?” “Oh, what do you mean? What do you mean? Why are you calling me?” I said, “You’re still scamming all these people.” “No, I’m not, I’m not.” And then he hung up, but and probably if I called the same number again today, he would answer again.
[00:30:06] Bob: That is wild.
[00:30:07] Pam Dodds: Because they’re not stopping.
[00:30:11] Bob: Wow.
[00:30:12] Bob: They’re definitely not stopping.
[00:30:17] Lisa Fletcher: Pat and I stayed in touch over the years, and I think we probably did one or two follow-ups along the way just saying this was still happening. I remember getting some really disturbing phone calls from Pat saying, you know, “I’m in physical jeopardy here. I’m having people show up in my driveway. I’m having people show up on my front porch thinking I stole their mother’s retirement.”
[00:30:41] Bob: That’s really scary.
00:30:42] Lisa Fletcher: It was really scary, and he’s a tough guy. He is not easily scared, but this had him concerned, reasonably so. I mean imagine that, in the dark of night people are banging on your front door demanding to see you because they believe you have bilked their mother out of her life savings. And that’s what he was facing. He’s, “Somebody’s going to get hurt. And, and it’s probably going to be me.”
[00:31:05] Bob: So now it’s deadly serious. It must be a helpless feeling for you, right?
[00:31:09] Lisa Fletcher: Yeah, as a reporter, I want to be able to do something, right? I think it’s embedded in all of our DNA that the reason we do this job is because we hope to fix things that are going wrong. And this is not a situation that I or anyone could fix. The genie was out of the bottle.
[00:31:26] Bob: The genie is out of the bottle. Somebody’s going to get hurt, and everyone seems powerless to stop this crime. Years go by. 2020 passes. The pandemic, and then…
[00:31:40] Lisa Fletcher: And then it must have been oh two years ago now. I got a call from Detective Gillespie in South Carolina. And he said, “I’m working on a case about a man named Pat Marsh.”
00:31:56] Bob: Detective Eric Gillespie, in small Easley, South Carolina, is investigating a case about 8 years after Lisa first met Pat.
[00:32:06] Det. Eric Gillespie: Yeah, so the general outline, she uh, I believe was a recent widow, don’t, not 100% sure on that. Some circumstances lead to her creating a profile on a handful of different dating websites for, exclusive to older uh, older people. So she met “Pat Marsh” through one of those websites.
[00:32:30] Bob: And she had sent him money.
[00:32:32] Det. Eric Gillespie: Yes. So it started, I believe started pretty small, I say pretty small, it’s a lot of money to me still, a few thousand dollars here and there. And eventually evolved uh, I, I’d say pretty quickly evolved especially for what we typically see with romance scams. It evolved pretty quickly into her taking out home equity lines of credit to finance these and actually attempted to get a couple of them. And as, as a result, just the, our victim here had sent approximately $600,000.
[00:33:05] Bob: Oh my God, $600,000.
[00:33:09] Bob: Detective Gillespie trying to help the widow in his town who took out a loan on her home and sent $600,000 to a man named Pat Marsh. Well he pulls on a thread and he finds his way to reporter Lisa Fletcher
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