I write this post after coming to the 4th stage of grief...acceptance. I accept that my $6,300 that I was going to use to pay for my school tuition is gone forever. It took me a few weeks of agony and anxiety to come to that place of acceptance, but here I am. The thing about this post is that I am identifying a scammer and someone who I now consider to be a complete piece of dog shit, but I also hope to lay out my own mistakes, so that you may read about them and not repeat them. I feel like a complete moron, but I am no doubt humbled from this.

the situation

When I say the situation, I am not talking about this d-bag, which is probably what drevoh looks like in person.

Here is a brief overview of what happened...

What drevoh did was first ask me to split my payment into two separate transactions. The deal was that I would release the first half of my Bitcoins to him after he showed me proof that he was going to wire transfer the full amount of the $6,300 to my bank account. I would then pay him the second half of the money after I had received the payment.
I agreed, even though it seemed like a somewhat sketchy deal, because this guy had a 100 percent feedback rating, I trusted him somewhat. I know now , as I should have then, NEVER release the Bitcoin before you get your money.

This was 3 weeks ago, and he had said that the transfer would take 2 days maximum. After it did not send for 4-5 days, he attributed it to Easter weekend.
On Wednesday April 4th, he had basically told me that I should have received an email from my bank (which I now believe to be fake), I did not see the email originally, but he told me to check my spam, and I saw it in there.

He asked me at this point to release the other half of the Bitcoin so he could get confirmation from his bank to send the money over. The email stated that I would receive the payment 1 hour after confirmation from the sender's bank. It has now been 5 days and I am fed up with this. This douche now has all of my bitcoin, and he continued to contact me after, making various excuses. He told me last Friday that if he didn't give me the money by the end of that day, I would know that he lied about the wire transfer. Well, it never came, and he went cold on me that whole day.

I reported him to the admin team for localbitcoins and they basically told me that I couldn't do anything to get my money back. Saturday morning he contacted me again and assured me that he was legit and that he would make a direct deposit to my account on Monday morning. Of course, Monday came around and the guy disappears. At this point, I have had it with this guy, and his jerking me around with his constant excuses.

Letting the Darkness Consume Me

I gave up on the hope of getting my money back and now I just want to destroy this guy's reputation on the website so that he is unable to scam other people who were as gullible as I was. You can't trust people in the world and particularly in this space. I have been contacting the localbitcoins admin about banning this piece of dog shit, and I am trying to gather all of the information I can to report him to the FBI (don't expect them to do this).

Bounce Back

I guess I could look at this and agonize over this, or just move forward and no longer think about it. It is a ton of money for someone my age and in my position, but I am going to make it back. I will include a screenshot of our last messages (from this morning) below.

As you can see. I told the guy that he could literally only pay me HALF of the money that he owed and he didn't, so I gave up playing nice with him.

Learn From My Mistakes

If you are going to use local bitcoins, NEVER release your bitcoin before you receive your money. This was a very painful lesson for me to learn, but these guys have tricks up there sleeves, manufactured bank documents, etc. And please avoid this guy if you are on the website.