A woman was left with a $163 (N79,000) bill after her date invited her to a fancy restaurant, ordered lots of food and drink, then fled without paying.
According to DailyMail, Diane Guilmette had joined dating website Plenty of Fish when she received a ‘very flattering’ message from a man police later identified as Paul Gonzales.
She agreed to meet up with Gonzales and the pair arranged to go to a fancy restaurant.
He ordered ‘a lot of food’, and several glasses of wine as they sat chatting on their first date, CBS 2 reports.
It was all going well, or so Guilmette thought, until Gonzales went outside ostensibly to make a phone call. He never came back.
Guilmette said she sat at Morton’s Steakhouse in L.A., waiting for her date to come back from his phone call for 15 minutes before the reality began to sink in.
When she realized her date was not coming back, she tried to message him on the Plenty of Fish app only to find that he blocked her.
She was forced to pay the $163 out of her own pocket.
When she took to social media to share her story, along with pictures of her date, Guilmette said several other women came forward to say that he had done the same thing to him.
Each time he had chosen a high-end restaurant and sneaked out, leaving them with the bill.
One woman, who did not want to be named, was left with a bill for more than $100 after he ‘went to the bathroom’ and never came back.
Despite the horrendous first date, Guilmette says she has not been put off internet dating, although she may be a little choosier on who she goes on dates with in the future.
Police say Gonzales is also facing two pending cases of petty theft, and is accused of failing to pay for a haircut at a salon back in February.
The guy is a very bad guy, he fled without
paying.