Greg's Corner

Widow homeless after romance scam

By Greg Collier

As we featured in our last post about romance scams, romance scammers will lead their victims on for months before asking for any money. Meanwhile, these scammers are manipulating the emotions of people who are just looking to stave off loneliness. People whose partners have passed away are often targets for romance scammers.

It’s not just a few bucks we’re talking about, either. We’ve seen reports where romance scam victims have lost anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to over a million dollars. Romance scammers are in it for the long haul and are willing to wait a long time to get money like that. And it’s not just money that the victims lose.

A widow from the state of Georgia struck up a relationship with a man she met online. The man claimed to have lost his wife as well. He also claimed to be a doctor working for the Red Cross in Yemen. If someone isn’t aware of how the romance scam works, they may just think they’ve met an incredible partner. Not only is the man supposedly a doctor, but he’s working for a charity overseas in a war-torn country.

Those who are familiar with the scam will recognize the red flags. Romance scammers almost always claim to either have some high-paying position or are in the military. The Middle-East is a popular location for scammers to claim where they’re working at. Due to the political instabilities in many Middle-Eastern countries, scammers use these to concoct many excuses for either their money requests or why they can’t meet in person. We’ll get to more of that shortly.

Getting back to the story at hand, the scammer in this story told the Georgia widow he wanted to buy a house with her in Cary, North Carolina. The scammer claimed he would pay $600,000 for the home, while all she would need to pay would be $78,000 that she needed to wire to him, which she did.

She was provided with an address and pictures of the house in Cary. When she arrived there with all her belongings, she discovered someone was already living there. That’s when she realized she had been scammed. She tried confronting the scammer, but the scammer stuck with his story, even sending her a picture supposedly showing that he had been beaten up in Yemen.

Now, the widow has very little to her name except for a camper which someone from a local church donated to her. She should be commended for having the bravery to share her story publicly, as many victims don’t. According to the Federal Trade Commission, victims lost more than a billion dollars to romance scams, and that’s only from the ones who came forward.

Romance scams raise significant warning signals. These scams exclusively rely on online communication and often involve the perpetrator sharing a heart-wrenching narrative. Moreover, if at any point you are solicited for money, whether through wire transfers, Bitcoin purchases, or gift card requests, consider it a definitive indicator of a scam.