Lessons from a Love Scam: Protecting Your Heart and Your Wallet

Don’t fall for someone online unless you know them!

This is the cautionary tale of a woman in her fifties who fell victim to an online love scam, losing her hard-earned money.

“You gotta be kidding me!” I gasped as I heard the amount of money my friend mentioned. It was literally a quarter of our annual earnings!

We were both in our fifties; me in my late fifties, she in her early fifties. Thus, I was like an older sister to her.

A couple of months prior she had met someone online. A man in our age group, from the western part of the globe who told her that he was working for an oil rig off the coast of our country.

Their friendship bloomed and quickly turned into ‘love’. How it progressed that fast, I have no idea, but there she was sitting next to me checking calculations on how much she will have to repay the bank, if she were to obtain the cash loan, for him.

“What do I do now”, she asked.

“Block him”, was my reply.

“Noooo…”, she playfully pushed me.

“What if it is a scam”, I asked her. She just looked at me and I could see that she was love struck.

No one, except me, knew of the existence of that person in her life, though she was from a close-knit family. She kept it a secret.

One can’t blame her. She has been divorced since the second year into her marriage way back when she was in her mid-twenties. It has been many long years of loneliness.

So, when she met this man on a dating site, things progressed very fast. And there she was sitting with me, deeply considering getting a cash loan to help him in his downtime.

To me, from the word go, it seemed like a love scam.

In Malaysia, a total of 7,548 love scam cases had been reported from 2018 until June 2023 with losses reaching RM382mil (USD76mil). That is a whopping huge amount of money to be lost for ‘love’!

While scammers profited, someone must have painfully lost their money; and to add to the injury, 83% of love scam victims were females.

The US was not spared either. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, older adults reportedly lost nearly $139 million in romance scams which are riskiest to people in the 55–64 age group.

It was also reported that many of those romance scams originate in west Africa, predominantly Nigeria and Ghana. Criminal organisations use legitimate dating apps to defraud people who are looking for love. The scammers strategically target recently widowed or divorced seniors due to their vulnerabilities and access to cash.

So, how do you think my friend was hooked? By a cat. Yes, the dude professed his love for his cat (probably after seeing her cat photos on her profile) and my friend had a few, so that was how everything started.

There were red flags everywhere from the beginning, but she chose to ignore them. Among the prominent red flags were:

1. There was only one photo of him on his profile; not even his cat’s photo was there. She had asked for more photos, but he never obliged.
2. He was in love with her within three weeks (!) of talking on Messenger. Super speed, don’t you think?
3. He promised to meet her hundreds of times, but it never happened. There was a time he sent a video of a town in Malaysia saying that he was there for a business meeting. It looked like some sleepy hollow in a rural area, hardly a place to have any meetings.
4. Another time, he was supposed to meet her in our city but as he flew in, suddenly his mother passed away in Australia, so he took another flight out to attend her funeral. We let it go as probably his family lived in Australia while he lived in Canada.
5. His story asking for money was that he had a government contract with an oil and gas refinery but ran into trouble when the government refused to pay. He had to pay his workers etc. so he needed the money.

As our discussion on her cash loan progressed, I asked her just one thing — if she wanted to part with her money so badly, what would be the amount that she was willing to write off?

She put a number to that figure, and yes, she did obtain the cash loan and sent the cash to him, and that was the last time she ever saw the money.

In the same year our employment ended when the company closed down and I saw her struggle as she scavenged for money to pay off that debt. Thankfully, we landed new jobs within a month, but the debt followed her.

Her experience taught us a lot. Be very selective when looking for partners or with how you behave online.

Some of us can be very lonely after the passing of our spouse or post-divorce. Some people may have just chosen to remain single all their life and as their age hits fifty, suddenly realize that they are lonely.

While the reasons for loneliness can be many, there is only one reason not to lose any money — it was earned from your own hard work and that money is supposed to see you through your retirement.

As avoidance is always the better option, consider the following as you hit fifty:

1. Keep a few close friends with whom you can share some confidential matters. A few brains working together is always better than one person overthinking.
2. Beware of `too good to be true’ kind of people. They hardly exist; even if they do, probably this may happen to one in a trillion people. The world has eight trillion people, so only eight of the world population can have such experience, based on my logic above. What are the odds that the person wanting money from you is that person?
3. Avoid sharing too much on social media or any online platform. For me, avoiding social media fully should be an option to consider as we grow older. Scammers do not get in touch with you out of the blue. They study you first before making the first move. So, if suddenly someone messages you out of the blue, ask yourself why is that person interested in you.
4. Research the individual’s photo and profile using online searches to see if the image, name or other details have been used elsewhere. Do a Google Reverse Image Search to know the source of the photo. Go to Google, click on Images, drag the photo into the search box and you will get the results. Scammers often use dead people's details for their profile. Facebook and other social media are huge libraries where the dead continue living in cyberspace.
5. If someone professes love suddenly or after knowing you online for a very short period of time, be very afraid because that is how things begin. Ask yourself the logic of falling in love with someone you meet only online; have not met and have not spoken to in person. With artificial intelligence ruling the day, be more vigilant. Even a phone call could be fake.
6. It is best to meet in person. But be careful when you go out to meet the person, making sure your closest friends know of your plans. Get them to call you 10–15 minutes into the meeting; agree on some code words so that the other person does not get suspicious and make a hasty move that might cause you hurt or injury.
7. Listen to your gut feeling. Although it is known as a ‘gut feeling’, it originates from the heart. Your heart will not advise you against your own interest, so if at the onset itself you feel something is not right, cut off immediately or block the person. Remember, you need not worry about his feelings because once he gets his hands onto your money, he would probably be laughing all the way to the bank, oblivious to yours.
8. Please do not send compromising photos to anyone online, no matter how much the person says that they love you. Those photos could be used to blackmail you at a later date.
9. Do not be too worried if the scammer starts threatening you. Remember, if the scammer was as brave as he claimed to be, he would have appeared at your doorstep and not keep haggling you over the Net or other communication media. Block the person immediately. Reach out to the authorities, if the need arises.
10. Never ever send money to strangers.

Two months after going missing post receipt of my friend’s money, he contacted her again. He did not ask for money, just wanted to re-establish the relationship. It was a simple ‘Hi, how are you?’

“What do I do?” she asked.

“Block him.”

And she did.

References:

1. https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2023/07/12/over-7000-love-scams-reported-since-2018-mostly-female-victims (Accessed on 2 October 2023)
2. https://www.ice.gov/features/LoveOnline (Accessed on 2 October 2023)
3. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ (Accessed on 2 October 2023)