Soon after their first date, Sara Pateras was smitten. Christopher Wehner, a 27-year-old who said he worked in marketing, was fun and smart, and could charm strangers at a party.

He found her on Plenty of Fish, a dating website promising matches that lead to stable, long-term relationships.

But in November 2015, the romance began to unravel when Pateras’s mother discovered that more than $4,000 was missing from her bank account. Before long, Pateras had kicked Wehner out of her family’s Quincy home, where he had been living, police had been called, and Pateras had started investigating his past relationships.


Court and police records would soon reveal that Wehner was an alleged serial con man and thief who over the last two years had taken money from at least a half a dozen others around Boston and the South Shore.

One woman, who also met Wehner online, wrote him checks for more than $28,000 after he told her he was suffering from cancer. In West Roxbury, his landlady reported him to police after she noticed her checks missing just after Christmas 2015. Another landlord found $1,500 missing from his bank account, according to court documents.

Each time he was accused, Wehner appeared before a judge and was released without bail, a common outcome for a person charged with larceny. But Wehner consistently failed to show up for subsequent court dates, and authorities seemed unable to find him to face the more than 30 charges that had piled up against him.

Pateras was furious that Wehner was not behind bars. She reported him to the dating website where she had found him. He was removed, but she said she saw him on the site again months later.

In a statement, Plenty of Fish said a team investigates complaints of crimes by users and removes those accounts.


“In rare instances, someone who has been banned is able to reregister,” the company said.

Pateras said she felt totally helpless.

“Not only totally helpless but like this is just going to be allowed to continue and he’s going to be a perpetrator out on the streets,” she said.

On Aug. 11, nine months after he allegedly stole from Pateras’s family, Wehner was arrested by Somerville police after a new girlfriend accused him of stealing $800 from her bank account.

The next day he was in Chelsea District Court to face the first of nine arrest warrants, this one for larceny charges that followed a 2014 accusation that he had stolen $4,100 from a friend’s father.

Chris Wehner. St. John The Evangelist

Suffolk prosecutor Amanda Paull asked for $20,000 bail based on Wehner’s history of failing to show up for court. His defense lawyer, Janine Bandino, called the request “egregious.”

“He has no prior criminal record,” she told Judge Michael Patten. She described him as a struggling writer for FanSided, a sports website where Wehner occasionally writes about the Red Sox.

Money problems led to his alleged crime, Bandino said.

“He was suffering financially. . . . He was just experiencing extreme economic instability in the community.”

In court last week, Wehner, dressed in the same shorts and long-sleeved pink shirt he had worn during his arrest the night before, offered several reasons for missing court appearances: His address had changed, and court officials had given him confusing instructions.


Patten was unmoved and ordered him held on $15,000 cash bail.

Wehner is now at the South Bay House of Correction in Boston, and it could be weeks before he is released as he makes his way through four more courthouses to answer the myriad larceny charges he faces. The maximum penalty following a conviction for larceny is 30 months, but in a case involving multiple charges in multiple courts, he could face significantly more time.

The women who dated Wehner describe a genial man who would fold their laundry, pick up their groceries, and charm their parents.

Michaela Tower a 25-year-old single mother, was studying to become a dental hygienist when she began dating Wehner in 2014.

He told her he was a three-time cancer survivor and University of Notre Dame graduate working in international trade. He doted on Tower’s 2-year-old daughter and won over Tower’s reserved father.

“My dad is not a people person,” Tower said. “He’s a man of few words, and my dad actually loved him.”

A few months after they began dating, Wehner told Tower he had cancer.

Certain she was with the man she would marry, she wrote him multiple checks that he said he was depositing into a Dana Farber Care Account. In the end, she wrote him a total of 10 checks that added up to $28,650, according to a police report.

There was no reason to doubt him – he looked pale and thin. He shaved his head, and she had no reason to suspect he was not losing his hair due to chemotherapy.


But Tower said when she asked Wehner’s mother about the cancer, she was confused. Not only was he not sick, his mother told her, but he had never had cancer. And he had not graduated from Notre Dame.

Police contacted Dana Farber officials, who told them that the institute does not have “care accounts” like the one Wehner described to Tower.

Two years later, Tower remains in debt.

“I’m going to be paying it off until I’m 50,” she said. “I just feel like I was obviously young and naive. He knew I was looking for a family guy. When you're a single mom, who doesn’t want that image in your head.”

Pateras contacted Tower after her relationship with Wehner crumbled. When she learned of the cancer claims, she was shocked. He also told her he had cancer, Pateras said, and tried to use the illness in part to justify his theft. He claimed he needed some of the money for treatments, according to a police report.

Last week, Pateras heard from the mother of Samantha Darcy, a 28-year-old interior designer in Somerville who had been dating Wehner since May. They had met on the dating app Coffee meets Bagel. Darcy had already loaned Wehner money for a cellphone and a suit for his grandmother’s funeral.

He had recently told Darcy he had cancer, Darcy’s mother said.

Now Wehner was telling the Darcys that his father had died, and Darcy’s mother was growing suspicious. She looked online for an obituary but instead found an arrest report and a Twitter post by Pateras about Wehner’s other arrests.


Darcy said she then checked her bank account and found several unauthorized withdrawals.

Last week, the Darcys called the police. Since then, Pateras and Darcy have spoken regularly on the phone, bonding over the shared betrayal.

“I think she’s going to be my new best friend,” Darcy said.

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @globemcramer.