Catfish, pretending to be Hawaii Five-0 star Alex O’Loughlin, swindles woman out of $37,000

An Australian woman has revealed how she was scammed out of $37,000 by scammers pretending to be TV star Alex O’Loughlin.

The 45-year-old woman, who went by the alias Sonia, said she was contacted in November 2020 by a Twitter account with the same name as the 46-year-old Hawaii Five-0 star.

But the account was a fake, totally unknown to O’Loughlin, and the scammers used clever tricks to establish a relationship with the woman and convince her it was real.

The real O’Loughlin, who was born in Canberra, starred on the hit CBS show for its entire 10 seasons from 2010 to 2020 and resides in the United States.

There is no indication that O’Loughlin is connected to the scammers in any way.

“I look back on it now and think about how stupid I was,” Sonia, from the NSW country, told 9news.com.au this week.

The catfish, who pretends to be actor Alex O’Loughlin (pictured), swindled a woman out of thousands of dollars after she fell for the scam

O’Loughlin as Hawaii Five-0 (left) as Steve McGarrett with co-star Scott Caan

The scam started when she was contacted in November 2020 after mentioning Twitter that she liked Hawaii Five-0 and was following some of the show’s fan accounts.

First, she said the report seemed to gauge her viewer’s perspective of the program.

“The messages were all about the show and what I liked about it, what I thought about the last two seasons and stuff like that,” she said.

But eventually she was asked more personal questions about her life.

Initially skeptical, Sonia tested her interlocutor by asking questions that only O’Loughlin would know, such as his real name, which she said he knew instantly, although it was something that “you really had to look for.”

Their conversation, conducted by the scammer posing as O’Loughlin, switched from Twitter to WhatsApp and gradually became flirtatious.

He told her his marriage was in trouble and he was considering getting a divorce and settling back in Australia and he was developing feelings for Sonia.

After a month of constant messaging and just before Christmas, the scammer said he bought her a gift and sent photos of a $360,000 item he claimed he bought from a New York jeweler.

The woman was sent pictures of a piece of jewelry worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (pictured) that the scammers allegedly bought for her – but it never arrived

Sonia said she was so flattered that she agreed to pay the $8,500 “duty” to have the gift privately couriered from overseas.

When it never arrived Sonia became suspicious but the scammer was very apologetic and convinced her they too had been ripped off because the jewelry didn’t arrive.

He then offered to wire her the cash the jewelry was worth to make it up to her and referred her to the Trust Universal Bank website – a bogus institution.

When she asked why he couldn’t just transfer the money straight to her own checking account, he said it was too flashy.

‘He said he didn’t want his wife to know since they had a joint account,’ Sonia said.

So she set up an account using her own ID, and soon received an email saying someone had deposited $502,560.

As an apology, the catfish, posing as O’Loughlin, offered to deposit the value of the jewelry in cash into an account (pictured), but the website was fake and it was all part of the plan

She logged into her account via the website and sure enough the money appeared to be there – but when she went to withdraw it she was asked for a transfer code.

As part of the elaborate plan, she found out the transfer code would require an $8,000 fee, which she paid, and then another $20,500 transfer fee.

When the system then asked for another $12,000 in fees, she said she did some research and found that her logo came from the slightly differently named Trust Bank — a legitimate company that she called and was told it was give no records of their account.

She described the moment she realized it was all a hoax as “being hit like with a baseball bat.”

She added that she has since spoken to other victims of the same scam on the actor’s fan pages – some who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

O’Loughlin’s Australian representative, US agent and lawyer are reportedly aware of the scam being circulating.