Is my friend getting catfished/scammed?

I have a friend (25M) who met a girl (19F) on a dating app/website. They have been talking online for three months and have FacedTimed and he has confirmed she is a real person. They supposedly even talk on the phone every night. He booked a flight to Canada to visit her next week (we are on the East Coast). Based on the information he has given me, I’m very skeptical of her intentions.

• Her family owns a very successful restaurant and they have a large sum of money. But she hasn’t given him the name of the restaurant to confirm (for “privacy reasons”).
• She claims she has people after her and her family because of their wealth/business.
• She has social media (Instagram), but her mom created the account and won’t share it with him (for “privacy reasons”). She claims she will give him access to her phone and social media after they meet in person.
• She has offered to show him a video tour of her house to verify her wealth, but when he brought it up, she deflected and became aggressive towards him.
• She is going to pick him up at the airport or they will meet at a public restaurant.
• They only talk on Discord and Snapchat. He doesn’t have her phone number or e-mail address. She also shares her Snapchat account with her friend.
• She was supposed to come visit him here, but her parents wouldn’t allow it, so he is going to her instead. However, her parents let her travel internationally with her assistant, who is a male. They supposedly just went to Europe. However, she didn’t send him any pictures until after the trip because her phone got taken away by her mom and she was using her assistant’s phone.
• She lives with her family in Vancouver, but she is supposedly driving with her friend to Regina for 18 hours to hang out with him for a week at her own house (he booked a hotel room).

Whenever we tell him how sketchy this sounds, he claims that she is not like us common folk and that she has these protocols for security/privacy reasons. What are the odds that he is getting catfished/scammed? He says she has never asked him for money or gifts.

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TL;DR: My friend met a girl online and he is flying across the continent to see her. She has no Internet presence and we cannot confirm anything this girl has said.

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* This article was originally published here