Marcus Elliot Filoso’s first text to Laura Catherine Scaffidi Argentina was a joke. “This is the Canadian I.R.S.,” he wrote in August 2020. “You owe us 1 billion dollars.”
“She didn’t respond to my text, but she e-transferred me a dollar,” Mr. Filoso said. He texted her right back about getting together.
The two first met on July 30, 2020. Ms. Scaffidi, as she is known professionally, had started an Aperol pop-up bar during Covid in the Little Italy neighborhood of Ottawa, and Mr. Filoso had come by with friends. “I thought she was super cute,” Mr. Filoso said. “And she could put up with my friends.”
Both were of Italian heritage and lived in a tight-knit Italian community in Ottawa. “We had lots of mutual friends,” Ms. Scaffidi said. “I knew his parents before I knew him.”
She found him on Instagram and followed his account the day after they met.
On Aug. 14, 2020, he posted a story about his Vespa. She reached out. “I asked him to take me for a ride to film content for a local Italian festival,” she said. He asked for her number in response. That’s when he sent her the faux phishing text.
They did finally arrange for that Vespa ride on Sept. 12, after which they went to her pop-up bar. “They ran out of paper menus when we were there, and their printer wasn’t working,” Mr. Filoso said. “So we walked to my office to print her more menus. It was not a normal date.”
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The post She Didn’t Fall for His Faux Phishing Text. She Fell for Him. appeared first on New York Times.
