Hello Jacustomer,

This is the third time in a week and a half that someone has written in here and asked about the history of Stephen Harry Graham who claims to be a civil engineer in Dubai. Unless they were all you, that should tell you something right there in and of itself, especially since I am only one expert in this category and the matter of Stephen Harry Graham may have been handled by others as well.

We can't determine if someone is real. We can't run a formal background check, particularly if someone is outside of the US and we are working on not much more than a name.

However, names, careers, addresses, phone numbers, country of origin, email addresses, phone numbers can all be falsified. So there's no point in wasting time with that. You need to focus on how the relationship runs its course. No matter what they call themselves or where they claim they are, romance scammers proceed in a remarkably similar way -- a way that is nothing like the way relationships go in real life. You can answer your own question here by stepping back from your feelings for a bit and taking an objjective look at the pattern.

Here are the tell-tale signs of the romance fraud:

- the scammer reaches out to you on a dating or social networking website and he falls in love with you at first sight. His profile shows an attractive, well educated man with his own business and you can't believe your luck. He's generally a widower with a son or a daughter.

- He moves in on you and sweeps you off your feet, rushing the relationship towards some kind of a commitment. He pulls you off the site where you met and tells you that he wants an exclusive relationship with you via webcam, skype, Yahoo messenger, etc. He talks of love, marriage, future and forever.

- He is in another country, not his own, usually though not always in Ghana, Nigeria or Malaysia for work as an engineer, a geologist, an architect or a construction or mining supervisor. He desperately wants to meet you as soon as his contract is up. He may even refer to you as his wife or fiancee, though you've never met.

- And as soon as he sees that you return his feelings, the conversation turns from love to money and he has the first of an endless series of unfortunate events. He has an accident at work or a problem with his credit card, a theft at his hotel, or he's mugged on the street and needs you to pay his hospital bill, or his son comes down with something serious, or he has work or legal expenses he must clear before he can see you. There are dozens of excuses, no one truthful. But despite the fact that he claimed to be a successful, self reliant kind of guy, suddenly he doesn't have another friend in the world. Only you, he says, will be able to help him. And so he will ask you to wire money to him via Western Union and will say that he will pay you back when he shows up at our door. But he never will get an inch closer to that plane. There will always be an emergency. And it will always cost you.

You can just Google "Romance Scams" and see an countless people reporting how they got caught by romance scammers who stole their money.. Here is one of many sites devoted to warning about and exposing scams.

Despite all of his words of undying love, the only thing really keeping him around is the thought that he will get your money.

If this is soundiing familiar, it's a scam each and every time. Cease all correspondence with him before you get hurt. If you've already wired money to him, it's gone. Report the fraud to your local police and to the FBI at IC3.gov, which is their Internet Crime Complaint Center and which is devoted to web fraud. Your only chance of recovering your money is if the police are able to turn him up and bring him to justice.