Have you or do you suspect you have fallen victim to a con artist you met though the online personals or a Craigslist ad? If someone you met online through a personals ad seems too good to be true they probably are. If they're asking for money or a plane ticket you best be careful. These scams can be very elaborate and confusing so you should take a good hard look at the situation.
The way these scammers work is they prey on lonely people seeking companionship through online personal ads. It does not matter if they replied to your ad or you replied to theirs as these scammers work both sides of the ads. But after the first contact they will show greater and greater interest in you attempting to establish daily email correspondence with them in order to gain your trust.
After a while they may claim they need to take aa short trip out of the country, It is usually either a missionary trip, vacation or to visit a relative. Then you'll get an urgent email describing a terrible accident or robbery and they are stranded without funds and need your immediate financial assistance to get back to the United States. They will almost always ask you to send the funds via Western Union wire transfer. Often times they will make sudden changes to the wire transfer recipient information at the very last second. Once you send the funds you'll never hear from them again unless it's to try to get more money out of you.
If this sounds familiar and you have not sent any money yet don't! It's probably a scam. the only way to be sure it's not is to hire an investigator to trace the emails to see who and where this person truly is. If you have already sent the money it may be possible to get it back. You can hire a private detective to trace the emails and locate and identify the person at the other end. If they 're in the United States you may be able to get the police involved and get an arrest. Even if they claim to be out of the USA they may be lying about that in order to confuse you. The only way to know for sure is to professionally trace the emails back to the senders location.
There are private investigators experienced in handling these kinds of scams. They can trace the emails for you and verify the person's identity and location. If it is a scam they can reduce the findings of their investigation to a report that you caan bring to the police.