Posted by Tudor Bercea on May 16, 2013 in Personal Blog, Very Personal | 2 comments

Until last week I was in a relationship with a famous Indonesian soap opera and movie star. Or at least this is how it looked like at one point… This is the story of how how I got deceived and what to do so it won’t happen again.

It was just a usual Friday, on February the 1st, I think it was around noon, trying to finish some work and get ready for the week-end. When suddenly, I hear the pop-sound of a new message received on facebook. It said: “hiiiiii…salutari” and it was sent by someone called Lolita Zair. I said hello back and asked her if we have ever met. Then I checked her facebook profile and realized she was a lovely Indonesian girl. She told me we have never met, but went on to ask me questions like how old I was, where I was from and if I was married. I begun to feel like the old days, in the early beginnings of the internet when the only chat available was mIRC and when you could chat with total strangers – all you had to do is approach them with the term “a/s/l” (that comes from age/sex/location). I found out she was 23 year old and apparently she only recently joined facebook because she only had about 10 friends. But I simply couldn’t get my eyes off her profile pictures. Almost all of them seemed to have been taken by professional photographers, and she looked amazing in all of them. But hey, who can blame me when she looked like this:

I wanted to make sure it’s not some cousin or sister in her pictures, so I asked, and she confirmed it was herself. I asked her a couple of times how she found me, but she always avoided the answer and changed the subject. But I didn’t care. That day was my lucky day!

The next month or so we spent chatting on facebook, trying to get to know each other better. I even used Google Translate in an attempt to impress her with my allegedly Indonesian skills. We talked about everything, from what we do for a living, what are our dreams to even using Google Maps’ street view to walk around Bucharest and Jakarta and visit each others’ cities. Everything seemed to be getting better and better and pretty soon she ended chatting by telling me “I love you”. Then, one day she told me that before we continue she had to tell me a secret. And so she told me she is actually a single mother, taking care of her 5 year old son. It was pretty big news, and she thought I would chicken-out, like most men and give up on her because of this. But I told her this doesn’t make her less beautiful, and that I admire her sincerity. So everything went back to normal, until one day, when she sent me a message saying she was sick and she needs money to pay for her medical insurance. That’s when I begun to be a bit suspicious, but pretty soon I forgot about the incident and everything went back to normal. In March I even sent her a letter with a perfume sample from my own perfume, and a “martisor”. I was starting to like her more and more and I wanted to show her that. On Labor Day (May 1st) I event went to the seaside with some friends and made this photo, dedicated especially for her:

(Sayang means “Dear” – a word she used very often when we chatted)

So I uploaded this photo on facebook and tagged her on it. And this is when things started to get really interesting.

I was contacted by Molly Husu, the wife of a friend of mine. She is an Indonesian living in Bucharest. She saw the photo I took in her news feed and noticed the word “sayang”, and the fact that I tagged Lolita. She asked me how I met her, and if it’s really her in the profile picture. She said she actually knows the person in her profile pictures, but her name is not Lolita Zair. Apparently, the woman in the profile pictures was a famous Indonesian soap opera and movie star called Luna Maya, who was forced to flee her home country due to a sex tape that her boyfriend took of them making sex. I immediately looked up “Luna Maya” on Google Images and that’s when all my hopes and desires came crumbling down. All the photos I received from Lolita Zair were actually taken from the internet and belonged to Luna Maya! I even saw the famous sex tape. There were only two possibilities: either she used a fake name, or fake photos on her facebook profile. Now, I consider myself to be a lucky person, but not as lucky as to be in a relationship with the famous Luna Maya. She lied to me all this time, that is if she was even a woman at all! For it could have been a man, for all I knew.

The next time I chatted with Lolita, I confronted her and asked her if she ever heard of Luna Maya. I guess that really scared her, because she immediately deleted all of Luna Maya’s photos from her facebook profile. All I wanted to know is why she did it. She didn’t give me any answer. She said she simply doesn’t know why she did it. To this day I have no idea what was in her head. Maybe she wanted to ask me for money, maybe not. All I know is that I finally got to know how she really looks like because I asked her to send me a photo of herself, and she is not an ugly girl. She promised she would’n lie anymore, but it’s too late now, because the magic is over. Even if I will forgive her one day, I don’t feel the urge to contact her again every time soon. All I feel is disappointment, and the feeling that I learned something from all this.

So in case, you too are approached by some “hot model overseas”, I thought of 4 steps you can follow to make sure you will never be tricked:

1. Find out everything about her
   • When you ask her how she managed to find you, don’t settle with an answer like “I don’t want to talk about it. It is not important.” It is important! If she doesn’t want to answer, then something’s fishy.
2. Ask her to have a video Skype meeting or Google Hangout
   • Lolita told me she doesn’t have a personal computer and is only using the computer at her office, which didn’t have a camera. That was a bit suspicious too. If she really wanted to have a video meeting, she would have found a solution.
3. Ask your foreign friends’ opinion
   • Try to find someone who is from the same country as her. Maybe a friend, or a friend of a friend. And ask them what they think about the person who contacted you. They may give you valuable insights!
4. Use “Search by image” option from Google Images
   • Go to www.google.com , then click on “Images” and then click on the small “camera” button on the right side of the search field. You can now upload any photo and search for simmilar photos on the internet. If you have her photo, you will immediately be able to find out if she took it off the internet and if she is using a fake identity. This small trick didn’t strike me until it was too late.

Thank you for having the patient to read this article until the end. I hope it was useful. If you have any further questions, make sure to use the comment section below.