Excellent point. At our first meeting, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and figured that maybe I wasn’t understanding correctly, or that maybe there was some bureaucratic hurdle in Germany or in her home country that I wasn’t personally familiar with. But at our second meeting, I started to think harder about all the details that weren’t adding up and realized I should stay on guard.

In hindsight, her story about not having access to her credentials makes me wonder if she herself had been compromised.