Harassed And Threatened After Being Ghosted By Date
Sorry this is long, but I am laying out all the details here so there are no further questions, and I want to make sure I am taking all the correct steps now. Location: New York
I met a girl on a sugar dating website in a town I was visiting for the weekend. Her profile said she was 22, and I am in my 30s. I asked her what things she likes to do in town on a Friday night, and she said she was more of a homebody. So I said we could just hang out my hotel room and order doordash or something, and she said that sounded great. There was never any talk of doing anything else. The week leading up to the meeting, she kept texting to check that we were still on, making it seem like other people had flaked on her before and that I was for real. Eventually she asked if I would be okay paying her some money up front. It is sugar dating after all. I told her I'm only comfortable if we at least meet first, because I'm not sending money into the ether. She said we would talk in the hotel lobby.
The day of, she starts texting from a different number, which is fine, as I have multiple numbers and use a google voice number for texting, and she acts even more eager to meet, hoping to do so even earlier. I happen to be available an hour earlier than originally planned, and she comes right over, even getting to the hotel ahead of time. We sit in the lobby and exchange some money. She wants to confirm I'm actually staying at the hotel. I show my keycards. She follows me to my hotel room, makes a phone call to her "friend who drove her, to tell her she's safe," then in my room she looks around and seems to agree that it's safe. She asks how long we think we'll hang that evening (Her: "do you think it'll be, like, 2 or 3 hours?" Me: "Sure, that's cool.").
Then she says she has to go back to her car to get the rest of her stuff. I immediately realize this a tactic to ditch me, and before I can question it, she takes off her hoodie and leaves it with me to show she'll be back, which makes me feel slightly better, but at this point I realize I've probably been scammed. 5 minutes later, she texts me saying she's on her way back up to the room, but of course she never arrives. I already knew it was suspicious the way she was acting the whole time, and that's what I get for being lonely and willing to pay a woman to hang out with me. I threw out the hoodie and figured that was it, that she duped me and got money from me and didn't have to do anything but show up to a hotel briefly. The entire interaction from her arriving in the hotel to departing was less than 15 minutes, and I'm sure that hotel cameras would corroborate that she was in my room for maybe 2 minutes at most.
3 days later I start to get repeated calls from a number with the area code matching hers, I eventually try calling back. Then it calls me back again. I didn't realize it was calling me on my google voice number, which forwards to my personal phone (and does not have a voicemail greeting), and so then I stupidly call back on my personal number, and then it calls me again on what turns out to be my personal number and gets my voice greeting with my real name (an uncommon and googleable name at that). It's a man who claims his name is Don and really wants to have a conversation with me before he "goes to the police." And now he has my full name. I don't cooperate, I hang up, and I start blocking numbers. I get a text from the girl's original number saying I better talk to him and better have good lawyers, that I'm a pedo and a creep. I block those too. Then I get about 30 calls from a hidden number, as well as from a new number matching my personal number's area code. A voicemail is left from a hidden number saying that I need to cooperate, and a text is sent from the latest number mentioning my employer's name and how things will get super super messy for me.
I let me colleagues know that it appears my phone number has been compromised and that someone might try to extort me, so they are aware. I have not yet filed a police report, but I plan to do so in the jurisdiction of the hotel, as well as where I live, since my employer was mentioned and my name can possibly be tied back to my house through the right internet searches. I have also obtained an Incogni account and am in the process of scrubbing my data from the internet. Social media accounts have gone private. All the phone interactions with the various numbers have been saved, and everything was also reported to the sugar site, which resulted in her account being suspended. If the pedo accusation is real, then she should not have been on the site posing as a 22 year old, and she basically committed theft even before trying to further extort me, which is a bold move. I have also chosen not to pursue any further activities on that website (made my profile invisible) but still have the account active at the moment for any further communications with its admins post-incident.
Is there anything else I can do, short of hiring an attorney just in case? Part of me really just wants someone to get the hotel camera records saved, because that would show everything other than the 2 minutes she was in my room. What else is a lonely scammed man to do?
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