A self-proclaimed online dating rube from Queens slapped OkCupid with a lawsuit after a man he met on the singles site swindled him out of over $70,000. Hopeless romantic Michael Z. Picciano blames OkCupid and its parent company, IAC, for failing to conduct “even minimal screening of its subscribers and therefore deceptively creating the impression that their dating service was safe … when in fact … [it] was a trap for the unwary,” he says in his Manhattan civil suit. Picciano, 65, first received a message from “genuineguy62″ on Feb. 11, 2013. The Little Neck man says he “felt safe” and “trusted” his online match, purportedly a man named Bruce Thompson, simply because he had a profile on OkCupid, which bills itself as “the best free dating site.” By March the two had spoken on the phone, over Skype and through their personal email accounts. He even agreed to Thompon’s suggestion to delete their online accounts since “they had found each other,” according to court papers. Picciano says he “felt comfortable” with his new beau and readily agreed to wire Thompson $24,000 “for unexpected fees he incurred in his dealings setting up a new computer parts business” — even though the instructions required him to send the money to a “Dennis E. Racer” in Addison, Texas, and an “Edmond Thebeau” in Canada. Then in April, Picciano, perhaps blinded by his newfound love, sent yet another payment of $46,420 at Thompson’s request to “MacBenson and Associates” in the UK through his Capital One bank account, the suit says. That same month, Picciano got wise to the ruse and a friend helped him track down Thompson on a site called malescammers. “It was apparent that Mr. Thompson had used the same Cleveland, Ohio based phone number and the same email address, bthomsonb@yahoo, with Mr. Picciano that he had used to perpetrate other frauds,” the suit says. Picciano went to cops at the 111th Precinct in Queens and a detective told him to stay in touch with Thompson. Eventually the fraudster sent him a forged check and a loan note, but the crime lab found no fingerprints and could not trace the software used to create the phony check. Picciano finally stopped communicating with his ill-fated love interest in June 2013, but he says the con man is still trolling for victims on OkCupid under the screen name “bigheartedbt.” He wants to recoup the money he lost in the swindle. He is also suing his bank, Capital One, for failing “to comply with proper procedures for the transmission of wire funds.” The defendants did not immediately return messages for comment. Filed under
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:19:23 +0000
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