> ROMANCE PREDATORS
“He was very good with words,” Bourgeois recalls. “Some of the emails he sent
me were unbelievable. I showed them to
my friends and they were like, ‘Oh my
god, he’s so romantic. He’s wonderful’.”
After a week, Garic was saying, “I love
you,” and within a month he and Bourgeois were talking about marriage. He
said he lived in Chicago, and even called
Bourgeois from a 312 area code, but a
business trip took Garic to London before the pair could to meet in person.
Once Garic said he had arrived in London, he asked Bourgeois for $1,800, a
request that stunned her.
“When he first asked me for the money, it was like somebody punched me in
the gut,” she says. “When it started com-
HUFFINGTON
06.24.12
ing up [more often], I was pulling back a
little bit. I started getting a feeling.”
Bourgeois, who works for the state of
Louisiana, had searched for “Greg Garic” on Google when she first started
communicating with him, but nothing
suspicious came up. But when Garic’s
requests for money grew persistent —
to
the point that he asked her to use a credit card and take out a loan when she said
she didn’t have enough cash on hand —
she began to worry about his motives. So
she tried a different Google search: “Greg
Garic, internet scam.”
The results took Bourgeois to a victim support website devoted to exposing
digital scams where she counted at least
four women posting about Garic.
“Everything from that blog fit my situation to a T,” Bourgeois recalls. “I was
floored. I kept thinking how could I not
have seen it sooner?”
According to the site, Garic, who
couldn’t be reached for comment, was
a scammer working out of West Africa,
and one of the women in the support
group had posted the text of a romantic
email he sent her that Bourgeois recognized word for word.
“I’ve cried,” she says. “I cried Monday. I cried yesterday. I cried a little bit
today… He knew exactly what to say to
tug at my heartstrings. Because I can’t
have children, he told me I could be the
mother to his.”