Gay Dating Scam 1: Rod Greencorn

The first incident:
It started on April 25, when I found a profile whose age exactly matched mine. Unusually, the person listed a cell phone in the description, which I used to get initial contact. Eventually, We continued to message on Google Hangouts (the same happened on the second incident). I learned of the supposed person's name as Rodney Greencorn. I talked with him about the person's current situation at that time, and I collected the following info over the course of this chat (almost everything he gave me is supposed, since all of that could be fake):

* The person was living with a homophobic family at the time we talked online (either Muslim or conservative Christianity).
* The person was born on November 23, 1996, at least 21 years old by now. He lost both of his parents at an early age, and got adopted by a stepmother.
* He and the stepmother have traveled from Phoenix, Arizona to New York City, New York and stayed there until last year, when they had to go to Dallas, Texas, where the rest of the stepmother's family was at. According to the person, she died on August 23, 2017, due to lung cancer. leaving the person with an unsupportive family. Before leaving New York, he planned on going to college, but relocating killed his prospects for going there.
* Things turn bad after he asked me for a 'favor': Get him $30 worth of iTunes gift cards. I thought it wasn't a big deal, but subsequent requests always ended up in the hundreds (same goes for the second incident. As an excuse to try to push me to send gift card codes, he says that he lost his wallet that contained his driving license, as well as a phone that got wet. Sometimes we switched to wire transfers via Western Union or Moneygram, but both services stopped all but the first transfer I had with the former.
* He was only able to talk to me on certain times, even after midnight (which disrupted my sleep time), using his stepmother's family's desktop computer. When I requested pictures from him, he refused to give me any new ones besides the ones I already saw on his online profiles, claiming that he lacked access to devices that could do so.
* In the second half of May, that was when my family had been alerted to this incident, after I emptied my mom's account to zero. After this, the person says that it would be used in a court case to try to win his now-deceased stepmother's inheritance from the rest of her family worth ~$47000.
* After most attempts that I sent gift card codes, I thought that the person would be able to come over, but the person says that something else kept happening, from saying that the money got stolen to the money getting used towards document preparation fees in court. It became a seemingly never-ending scheme to drain me and my family of all their money, then move onto other people to repeat.
* Things took a turn on the last weekend of May (same day that your first meetup took place), when my now-canceled debit card was taken away from me, to stop me from sending more gift card codes. Then I suggested many ways that the person could help himself, but most of these suggestions failed.
* I did let the person access my Apple account for a while. However, I could see that he registered an iPhone 6 in Nigeria, contradicting his claims about not having a phone, and also turned off the Find My iPhone feature, to avoid giving out the phone's real location. Later on, I changed the password to this account, and also got rid of this device from my account.
* A little bit just before the second half of June, I caved into the person's pleas to give him membership back to Zoosk (I discovered that the person behind this incident had accounts on other dating services suspended before) via PayPal payment, and got a glimpse at what the person did. Instead of finding his supposed other relatives, he was talking with random people, possibly trying to lure them into doing the same thing, sending out iTunes gift card codes. Additionally, he now said that he was no longer in Dallas but in Oklahoma, to my surprise I heard that these gift cards are favored by these scammers because they enable them to hide/cover their real activities, even though they legally cannot be used outside of Apple services. After a few weeks later, I was lucky that I cut off auto renewal before I got locked out of that account, or I would've continued to lose money and had a harder time stopping it.
* Eventually, my sister had to jump in to masquerade as me, so she could help me deal with this person (also applies to the second incident). I got stubborn later on, and got rid of her help. Sometimes we had to block the person from contacting me., but they would eventually reach me through my email.
* I got the person to visit a website on my server computer, and I obtained the IP address. I looked up where it originates from, and to my surprise, wasn't anywhere that he said, but in Nigeria in Africa, supporting the fact of the iPhone 6 being registered in Nigeria. This no longer surprised me, as that country has a high frequency of where the scammers actually originate from. It become the last evidence that the person I was talking to was either nonexistent, or someone else pretended to be this person.

During most of July, I let this incident die down, stopped sending out money after $2000 was sent. By July 30, the person tried contacting for seemingly the last time, saying only "Hello" to me without continuing anything from last time a few times, then stopped afterwards. I had this person try to reach me again on November 1, after a hiatus of no talk for three full months. I blocked him soon afterwards, this time permanently, and the person stopped responding to me for good. I wondered about some of these flaws the person had in his talk:

* Why does he end his messages without a period?
* Why would a business be allowed to discriminate against gay people without reason?
* Why did I see contacts not originating from where the person said he lives every time we did wire transfers?
* The person declared his love for me too quickly, and claimed that he could feel it online, despite that I couldn't without having met him.

I should've heeded these and more signs that something suspicious was going on, but I shrugged, focused on trying to get the person to see me physically. But following the person's words and my emotions built from them led to this demise that warranted my family to send me to a behavior therapist. For three months, almost everything overall, including school, was going good, but would this last forever? Unfortunately, this good time slowly came to an end, as I will describe this second incident in another message.