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Sometimes you just want to feel loved. That's exactly what they use. I'm Diane. I spent thirty-one years managing the billing office at a dental practice, which means I have read a great many things carefully before signing them. I want to say that up front, because what happened to me wasn't a failure of attention. It was the opposite. I was paying very close attention to exactly the wrong thing. My husband and I split up five years ago, amicably enough, the way these things go when nobody's angry anymore, just tired. My son is in Denver. My daughter is in a suburb of Chicago I can never pronounce right. They call, but calling isn't the same as someone being in the house. I garden more than a person needs to garden. I volunteer at the library on Wednesdays, mostly for the company of it. The evenings are the long part. I joined a dating app in February because my daughter kept sending me articles about "healthy aging" that all seemed to boil down to "make friends," and I decided a dating app counted. David messaged me the second week. He was easy to talk to right away — not smooth, just easy, the way a good neighbor is easy. He said he was an engineer, out on a telecoms contract overseas, months from home. Three days in, he wrote: "This app is so glitchy 😅 let's move to WhatsApp?" I didn't think twice. I gave him my number. On WhatsApp he was constant, in the nicest possible way. A good-morning text before I was even awake. A voice note at night, tired, half-laughing at himself, talking about the life he pictured for the two of us — nothing extravagant, just ordinary things. A porch. Two coffee cups instead of one. Within a week he was calling me his soulmate, and I know exactly how that sounds written down. It didn't feel like that when it was happening. It felt like being chosen, after five years of nobody choosing anything about me at all. He asked about my kids by name. He remembered which one was in Denver. He asked how the library was on Wednesdays, unprompted, the following Wednesday. I told my friend Sandra about him over coffee, and she said, carefully, the way she says things when she's not sure she should, "An engineer overseas? That's the exact thing my sister-in-law warned me about." I told her David wasn't a scam, he was just far away, and those weren't the same thing. I believed that completely. I still think I was right to want it to be true — I was only wrong about the checking. A couple of weeks in, it came up so gently I nearly missed it. David mentioned a friend on his crew who'd done well putting a little money into a trading platform, laughed about it, waved it off — "not really my thing, I'm bad with numbers that aren't tied to actual cable." I remember thinking it was sweet that he had a thing he was bad at. Then he sent a link. A clean, professional-looking trading site, my name already sitting on a little dashboard when it loaded, a green badge in the corner that said Verified. "Just to test it," he wrote, "put in a little and watch it grow, then take it right back out." I sent two hundred dollars. By that afternoon the dashboard showed two hundred and sixty. He said he was proud of me, like I'd done something clever instead of something easy. I want to be honest about what that did to me. It wasn't the sixty dollars. It was proof — real, numeric proof — that he was exactly who he said he was, and it made the next ask feel like my own idea instead of his. A week later he mentioned a bigger opportunity opening up on his crew's shared account, something about a matching window closing, and I moved a real amount toward it — more than I'd ever admit to Sandra — because the first test had worked, and I had watched it work with my own eyes. The site glitched two days later, David said, and I'd need to use a fresh link to re-verify my position before the window closed. I picked up my phone to tap it, half-annoyed at the inconvenience, mostly just wanting it done. The screen went red before the page even finished loading. ⚠️ Guardio has blocked this site. This page is malicious. I assumed it was a fluke. I tried it on my laptop instead. Blocked. My son had put Guardio on both my devices two years ago, after some scare with a fake package text, and I'd rolled my eyes at him a little for fussing. I hadn't thought about it since — it had just been sitting there, doing nothing I noticed, until it did something I couldn't ignore. I called David to ask what was wrong with the site. There was a pause I had never once heard from him in two months. Then, flat, in a voice that didn't sound tired anymore, just careful: "Try a different browser. It's probably just your settings." Something in me understood before the rest of me caught up. I sat at my kitchen table, opened my laptop, and did the thing I should have done back in February. I saved his profile photo and ran it through a reverse image search. The same face came back under two other names, on a site that sells stock photography of handsome men in hard hats. I had already sent more than the original two hundred dollars by then. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, because the shame isn't really about the number. The shame is for how ready I was to believe that being chosen and being loved were the same evidence. I told Sandra everything, all of it, two days later, over coffee again. She didn't say I told you so. She just reached over and put her hand on top of mine for a second, which somehow said more than words would have. Run a free Guardio scan today. It won't ask if you're lonely, and it won't care how long it's been since anyone paid attention to you. It just checks the link before you tap it — which, it turns out, is the only part of this that ever needed checking.