Six months of dating-app contact ended with a proposed $500 investment account

My mother talked for roughly six months with a man she met on a dating app. He said he lived in California and had two teenage children. They moved to WhatsApp, where he would not provide a normal telephone number. At first he appeared decent enough that I encouraged her to continue getting to know him.

During a WhatsApp voice call, the conversation shifted to investing. He said he could make her thousands of dollars if she contacted another person through an unusual Proton email address. The proposal was for her to contribute $500, for him to match it with another $500, and for the third person to open and manage an investment account for them.

That was the point at which she became frightened, ended the call and asked me to look at the situation. No platform or domain was disclosed, and she did not fund the proposed account. After I explained why the sequence concerned me, she stopped engaging with the offer.

The contact did not immediately disappear. He continued sending apologetic and affectionate messages asking whether he had scared her away.