A dashing Don Juan in the Los Angeles area continues to scam unsuspecting women he meets online into paying for his meals. The 44-year-old, who goes by “Dave” or “Paul Gonzales,” uses dating apps to attract the women, then “dines and dashes” while out on the date. The cad is known to police and the local media, as he has struck numerous times in the past year.
The Casanova uses lines like “It would take a truly great man to describe all your beauty. Luckily, I happen to know one” to entice the ladies.
His latest victim is a woman who met him on Bumble, a dating app just like Tinder except that women must initiate the communication with their matches or else they disappear after 24 hours.
“He said ‘are you available at all this weekend for dinner?’ I said ‘yes, how about Sunday,’” said the woman, who did not want to be identified.
Via CBS L.A.:
They met at BJ’s in Pasadena, he ordered right away.
“A glass of Pinot, a Caesar salad with a side of shrimp, a steak , and a baked potato.”
She says after he scarfed down most his meal he got up.
“He left maybe half a baked potato and then received a phone call and said ‘I need to take this call,’” the woman recalled.
She says he never returned, leaving her with the bill.
“The waiter came back and said he’s not out there, is this a first date? And I said: ‘yes, this is a first blind date, and he said, ‘he’s gone.’”
Shocked, she went online and discovered our previous stories about Gonzales, how he had dined and dashed last summer, leaving at least two other women with large bills.
“I was shocked that anybody would do this. And I even texted him, is everything OK? and obviously he never responded,” she said.
Another woman — 39-year-old Diane Guilmette — described her dining experience with Gonzales last summer after meeting him on a dating app called “Plenty of Fish.”
Shortly after sitting down, Guilmette says, Gonzales ordered a shrimp caesar salad, steak, a baked potato with cheese and bacon, iced tea and a glass of wine. “He said it was because he was a bodybuilder,” Guilmette tells Us.
Over the course of their hour-long meal, Gonzales showed off videos of his kids playing basketball and spoke highly of his ex-wife. And then Gonzales stepped outside to make a phone call. “He told me not to let the waitress take his plate,” alleges Guilmette. “He said he would finish it when he came back.”
After 20 minutes passed, Guilmette, who never exchanged phone numbers with Gonzales, tried to message him through the dating app — only to discover that he had blocked her. When the $193 check arrived, Guilmette’s heart sank.
Gonzales doesn’t like to pay for haircuts, either. He committed what police called a “snip and ditch” at a Burbank hair salon where he got up and left with his smock still on after getting a cut and color last year. It was all caught on the security camera.
There are two bench warrants out for his arrest, according to the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office, for “not showing up to court for petty theft and driving without a valid license.”
Records show that the petty criminal has been to jail several times on misdemeanor charges.
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