Jilly walked over to the Delamar Greenwich Harbor, a stately hotel down the street. In the bar, she immediately noticed a fit, well-dressed man with a big smile and a full head of wavy white hair, combed as if blown back by breezes from the Long Island Sound. He walked up to introduce himself.

“I’m Nelson,” he said. “Nelson Roth.” He asked if he could join her for a drink.

Jilly was struck by how everyone there seemed to know him. He told her he was staying in Greenwich for a while because his apartment in New York was under renovation. Plus, he had some business in town. She recalled that he told her he was an art dealer who also had homes in the South of France and London. Jilly was an artist—a painter, which is what had brought her from Australia to New York after her divorce. This seemed to impress him. He looked at her as if he were already in love.

By the time she left, he had her number and they planned to meet again. That week, they got together for lunch at the Delamar’s restaurant, L’Escale. Soon after, Nelson drove Jilly into Manhattan for the day in a BMW i4 M50 coupe. They began to see each other regularly. At every restaurant, he tipped heartily and made conversation with the waitstaff and people at neighboring tables. After nearly a year of COVID restrictions and death counts, Jilly felt good to be out and about again. It was like coming back to life.

Nelson was 67 when Jilly met him, but unlike many men of his age and looks, he didn’t seem interested in women who were much younger. Jilly’s ex-husband had been “a brute,” as she put it. By contrast, Nelson seemed kind, generous and sweet. “And he was gorgeous,” she recalled. “Just a lovely person. I was so happy to have found him.” Soon they were spending almost all their time together, and she was, in her own estimation, “head over heels.”

Nelson, Jilly remembered, told her not to sell the house; they could do so much better, he told her, if they rented it out. The fact that he was so invested in her future suggested to her that he was in this relationship for the long haul. So she rented out the house and moved into the Delamar with Nelson. They ate every meal there at L’Escale, where the Maine lobster costs $60 and the drink menu features a $19 bourbon concoction dubbed Suspicion. Jilly’s time with Nelson felt like a fairy tale; after having endured so much difficulty and marital strife, she thought she’d been handed a whole new life of joy and ease.

There was one problem: The Prince Charming Jilly had fallen for was a sham.

AS Jilly and her adult children would later learn, the man who called himself Nelson Roth, and sometimes Justin Roth, was Nelson Counne, a serial perpetrator of romance frauds. He had served three separate sentences for grand larceny in the 2000s after spending years convincing well-to-do women he was an art dealer with business interests and properties all over the world. A vivid storyteller and smooth talker, he dressed well and took care of his natural good looks. His well-coiffed head of thick, white hair made Nelson stand out among other men his age. An actor, an investment banker, a schoolteacher, a personal trainer—all had been charmed and duped by Nelson. In a 2022 article for The New Yorker, I chronicled some of his exploits in Manhattan. Afterward, I got a flood of messages from people who had tangled with “Nelson Roth”—most of them in Greenwich, where he had started to spend more time during the pandemic. Many of them wanted their stories told too.

This is Jilly’s.

Online romance fraud has exploded in recent years. Over the internet, criminals employing fake profiles on dating apps and social media have sweet-talked thousands of victims into investing in sham deals or sending money to cover fake emergencies. In 2025, romance scam victims who contacted the Federal Trade Commission reported average losses of more than $30,000.

Nelson took an old-school approach by defrauding his victims in person, but the tactics of scammers—be they online or in person, romantic or otherwise—are universal. “Their genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire,” writes Maria Konnikova in her seminal book on the psychology of fraud, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It ... Every Time.

It’s no surprise that Jilly and a number of other older, single women would gravitate toward a handsome, seemingly well-off older man lavishing them with attention. Nelson’s victims were looking for companionship, as so many of us are, leaving them vulnerable to his practice of turning affection into money.

With the day-to-day human connections of child-rearing and/or career mostly behind them, older people can often fall prey to romance scams, says Jeanine Launay, chief of the Manhattan district attorney’s Elder Abuse Unit. Scammers “are very attentive,” she says. “No one’s going to care for you like they do. And that works.”

Perpetrators of fraud also benefit from most people’s tendency to believe that others are who they say they are. As one of Nelson’s victims put it to me, “I’d never met a dishonest person before. I’d never met a liar.”

That helps explain why Jilly was able to believe that Nelson had vast wealth tied up in various business dealings. And it explains why, once she moved in with Nelson, she began to pay for all their lodging and meals, and to give him the additional money he started asking her for. They were both well-off, she figured, so who cared who was footing the bill?

There was another problem: The year before Jilly met Nelson, her doctor saw signs of early-stage dementia. She didn’t tell her family. “She could get a little confused and seemed to have some memory loss,” her daughter, whom I’ll call Rita, told me. (She asked that her real name not be used, to protect her privacy.) But it was hard to know from so far away. What Rita knew for sure was that Jilly was smitten by Nelson. She’d call her daughter and put him on the phone, giggling in the background while he prattled on about “nonsense,” as Rita puts it. “He was a total idiot,” she says. “But I thought, As long as she’s happy….” She didn’t suspect that Nelson was a crook.

Though people with perfect cognitive ability get scammed every day, dementia can leave someone far more susceptible. “Once a criminal recognizes it, they will take every possible advantage,” explains Kathy Stokes, AARP senior director of fraud prevention programs. But dementia or no, “I think my mom would have fallen for it anyway,” Rita says. Jilly was a person who wanted to be swept off her feet.

And over the months when Jilly and I first communicated, I saw no signs of cognitive decline. In a half-dozen or so telephone calls totaling several hours, and in the dozens of emails we exchanged, the details she shared about her relationship with Nelson remained consistent.

WHEN JILLY FIRST crossed paths with Nelson in late 2020, he seemed to be almost a full-time resident of Greenwich, a town on Connecticut’s Gold Coast that’s just a short commute to New York City. It’s packed with inherited wealth and newly minted fortunes; the average household income is north of $276,000 and the typical home is worth more than $2 million.

“Scammers often end up in Greenwich because of all the money here,” Greenwich Detective Jim Manning, a specialist in fraud cases, explained to me.

This was relatively new hunting ground for Nelson, who had been a near-lifelong resident of New York City; most of his previous known targets had lived in the five boroughs.

That said, even before COVID, Greenwich seemed to be a regular travel destination for Nelson, who told at least two other women he dated that he wanted to invest in real estate there with them. But once the pandemic hit, it was much more attractive than New York City as a base of operations for Nelson’s brand of in-person fraud. COVID restrictions were far laxer there than those that hampered his activities in Manhattan’s restaurants and bars. Greenwich offered him a fresh start—and a new crop of prosperous women.

Jilly loved living in Greenwich, and now she loved Nelson. In his thick New York City accent, he told her about his difficult childhood as the son of a gangster father. Here, Nelson wasn’t lying: His father was an illegal gambling don with alleged mob ties who was murdered in 1975.

Jilly felt sorry for Nelson and protective of him. But his gentleness began to curdle. She recalled that he’d frequently snap at her, often when he’d been drinking. But she saw this as the fallout of his upbringing. “With a childhood like that, he never stood a chance,” she said.

More troubling, however, were his constant demands for money. According to Jilly, they’d walk into a bank and he’d tell her to withdraw a couple of thousand in cash, then hand it over to him. Sometimes, by her recollection, when he wanted more money from her bank account, he’d say, “You’re going to do this for me,” while holding her rather roughly, which she took as a kind of threat. (Nelson says he went into a bank with her only once; more about that later.) It was this cash—tens of thousands of dollars of her money—he now used to take her out and tip flamboyantly. But, again, she was in love. So even if he was spending her money, she told herself, at least he was using it for something good: distributing it to waitstaff and other people who were less affluent than the two of them.

Within a few months of dating, Nelson had convinced Jilly that he had a big deal coming through and that he would pay her back tenfold. Wanting to believe him, she kept giving him more money. The tens of thousands of dollars she’d forked over became hundreds of thousands. (Nelson claims the money she gave him was not for a business deal but for a campaign he came up with to fight racism in Greenwich.)

The human tendency to believe can work to the perpetrator’s benefit. As Konnikova explains, the deeper one is into the deception, the harder it can be to admit it, so a person keeps throwing good money after bad despite any nagging suspicions. And with romance scammers, there’s yet another reason for a victim to avoid any warning signs: They’d have to admit that the person they fell for had never really loved them. And that, in fact, that person hadn’t existed at all.

JILLY’S STORY OF the arc of their relationship echoed the experiences of other women I spoke with or learned about. Nelson had been at this game since at least the late 1990s and had developed a routine. When he first met a woman in person—sometimes in a chance encounter, sometimes through a dating app—he charmed her with his generosity, his attentiveness, his outgoing personality and his personal appearance; several women mentioned his hair in particular. (As a lover, Nelson got both positive and negative reviews.)

One woman who contacted me after the New Yorker story was published, Renée Gerson, was a Manhattanite in her 60s when she met Nelson in the early 2010s. He told her that he wanted to marry her and that he would soon make a fortune from his investment in the Chinese internet company Alibaba. Years later, there was Mary (who asked for her real name not to be used, to put her experience with Nelson behind her), a Greenwich woman Nelson had lived with before he met Jilly and who owned the BMW he had borrowed to take Jilly on their trip to New York City. And during the pandemic, there was Carla (another woman who asked for a pseudonym, for the same reason), whom Nelson also met in Greenwich.

After each new conquest, however, Nelson’s conspicuous displays of wealth would drift into urgent demands for money; his magnetism and good cheer would edge into hostility and sometimes abuse. He pressured Carla into paying a several-thousand-dollar repair bill for the BMW because, he said, he’d forgotten his wallet. (He claims he paid this money back.) He lived off Renée’s credit cards for months, telling her that his funds were tied up in art deals in London and Paris, but he would pay her back when Alibaba sold its stock to the public. Soon after it did so, he told her he had bad news, likely just more lies: He was under federal investigation and his accounts had been frozen. Left near-penniless, Renée was forced to sell her home. (Nelson denies he promised to marry her or told her about any art deals; he says he tried to get stock in Alibaba, but “it didn’t happen.”) As for Mary, on one evening in 2020, she and Nelson were arguing in a Greenwich parking lot when, by coincidence, Carla happened to drive by and witness the altercation. Nelson slapped Mary, who was then in her late 70s. He was arrested and charged with assault and conspiracy to commit breach of peace. (The charges were later dropped.)

This was another part of the pattern I heard from several victims: Just when they thought things were really good with Nelson, he would disappear for days, weeks or months on end, always with some elaborate story as to why. Then he’d return and shower them with love again. Eventually, each woman began to suspect that during these absences, Nelson was wooing other women—most likely with money he’d taken from her. She’d realize, too, that none of the money she had entrusted to him was coming back.

IN 2021, MONTHS into their relationship, Jilly woke up and realized what she had been too scared to admit to herself before then: “I was stuck in a very bad situation,” she recalled. She went to the Greenwich police and explained what was happening. They put her in touch with Manning, the detective who specializes in fraud cases.

The police called Nelson, after which Jilly remembered him being very angry at her for having gone to the authorities. Petrified, she recanted her story, but Manning was far from convinced. “I continued to worry about her,” he says. “And we kept an eye on the situation.” But Jilly was reluctant to accuse Nelson of wrongdoing, he says; she had a hard time acknowledging she had been scammed. This wavering is common. “Once someone starts getting sucked into this world, it’s very hard to separate them from the abuser or scammer,” says Launay, of the Manhattan DA’s office.

Even as she was seeing her situation more clearly, Jilly was still devoted to Nelson. On a road trip to Miami in early 2022, he announced that they were going to stop in Virginia for the night. “We’re going to get married,” he told Jilly. And they did. Part of her was excited, but another part felt like she had no choice in the matter. “It all passed in a rush,” she said. Afterward, they drove on to Miami, where they settled in at a hotel. “He drank a lot,” Jilly recalled.

By now, Jilly had sold her house for nearly $1.7 million, so there was a lot of money in her account. She decided to wire money to her family: about $70,000 to Rita, to help her purchase a house, and nearly $200,000 to her son, to help him launch a business. “I made her, made her—I’ll repeat one more time—made her” send the money, Nelson says. He claims this was a clear showing of goodwill toward the kids. But her son and daughter—whom Jilly hadn’t yet told that she’d gotten married—now suspect that he was trying to win them over in order to allay any concerns they had about him.

Soon, Jilly had another pang of doubt. On one of their visits to a Miami bank, Jilly found herself alone with a teller. “I told her, ‘He’s stealing all my money. He’s forcing me to give it to him,’­” she said. The bank initiated a fraud investigation and reached out to Manning. Then the bank called Jilly while she was in the car with Nelson, asking if she was OK. He grabbed the phone, she recalled, and said, “Of course she’s OK!” before hanging up.

When they drove back north, Nelson dropped Jilly off at a motel in New York. “I’ll be right back,” he told her. She waited for days, but he never returned. (“I was bringing her to New York [-Presbyterian] Hospital to see the best neurologist around,” Nelson says. “I had left her in the hotel to go to Connecticut to get my dogs and bring them back from there.”) Terrified and alone, Jilly said, she saw her situation more clearly.

Once again, she called Manning, who by then had learned that the Manhattan DA’s office was building a case against Nelson for his activities there. Manning got a spot for Jilly at a shelter for domestic violence victims in Connecticut, where she lived for several months. Nelson kept calling her, but she wouldn’t reveal her location. Even so, and even though he had taken nearly $500,000 from her, she missed him terribly.

Jilly’s children and friends arranged for her to fly back to Australia in late 2022. On the plane, concerned-looking flight attendants approached her repeatedly to ask if she was all right. “I must have been looking pretty haggard by then,” she says. When she was home, she confessed everything to her kids: Hundreds of thousands of dollars were gone—she had initially lowballed the figure—and she’d gotten married too, so Nelson might be entitled to more.

IN 2023, JUST as Connecticut law enforcement was preparing to bring charges against him, the case that New York prosecutors had been building since 2018 finally started to coalesce.

One of the biggest barriers to bringing perpetrators of fraud to justice is the unwillingness of victims to go to the authorities in the first place. They’re often embarrassed about what has happened to them. And victims of romance fraud commonly blame themselves, says Monica Whitty, a professor of human factors in cybersecurity at Monash University in Australia. “They don’t necessarily perceive what’s happened to them as a criminal act,” she says, “but, rather, as a stupid mistake they made.”

That may be why victims will often cooperate with an investigation only after they know others have already come forward, which is what started happening in New York City. One woman spoke up, then another, until the prosecutor’s office had assembled 12 accusers in all.

Meanwhile, Manning continued pursuing his investigation into Jilly’s situation, and in May 2023, New York police, acting on his behalf, arrested Nelson Counne at his one-bedroom walk-up on the Upper East Side.

“Where is all the money everyone is accusing me of having?” Nelson asked the DA’s investigator upon his arrest, according to the police report. “I’m seven months behind on my rent.”

What came next for Nelson was a grand jury proceeding in New York. Among other things, testimony there revealed that Nelson, who’d claimed to have properties and business deals all over the world, had never held a passport—or even applied for one. The grand jury indicted him on one count of fraud and three counts of larceny.

In jail awaiting trial, Nelson phoned Jilly in Australia, begging her for bail money. Despite everything, Jilly was tempted to send it. This isn’t surprising; Launay says victims commonly try to protect the people who have harmed them. Whitty, in her studies, found that about a third of romance fraud victims either went back to their victimizer or got caught in a similar scam later on.

Both Jilly’s son and Manning shot down the bail-money idea. “So much for my dreams of going back to Nelson,” she wrote me. “If it weren’t for all his lies, we would have had such a beautiful life together.” To Jilly, Nelson’s bad behavior was separate from who he really was; if he could be persuaded to abandon his schemes, all would be fine. But to the police and the people around her, Nelson the charmer and Nelson the criminal were the same person. You couldn’t have one without the other.

Nelson kept trying to reunite with Jilly. He texted her a listing for a house in Bermuda, claiming to have just purchased it so the two of them could live there together happily once all the legal stuff was behind him. Jilly’s son called the real estate agent to inquire about the house. It was still on the market.

In June 2024, a few weeks before his scheduled New York trial date, the then-71-year-old Nelson Counne pleaded guilty to stealing a total of $1.8 million from five different women. The judge sentenced him to four to eight years in prison. A month later in Connecticut, after pleading guilty to stealing $500,000 from Jilly, Nelson was sentenced to four years in prison, to be served concurrently with the New York sentence. He reported to prison that July. His first parole hearing will be held this November, when he’s 73.

Once Nelson was in custody, Jilly told me she was happy he was finally in prison, though she couldn’t help worrying about him. After all, they were still married; although she wanted a divorce, she said it was a logistical nightmare with her in Australia and him behind bars. “He looks terrible,” she told me in one of our last phone calls, after seeing a video of him in a courtroom. “I don’t think he’ll make it very long.” Without the trappings of wealth, he seemed to Jilly like a sad older man whose luck had run out. Plus, in jail, they’d sheared off most of his long, flowing hair.