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Romance Scam Costs NM Woman Almost $400,000
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We all think it won’t happen to us – that we will recognize the signs. We hear stories of people being scammed out of their hard-earned money – often losing thousands of dollars or more.
We say we would never be fooled. We would never click on a link we didn’t recognize or send money to a stranger. But would we? Would we know if a loved one was supposedly in trouble, or a utility about to be shut off or an account frozen? Or someone we had come to love needed our help? Do we really know how we would react?
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These financial crimes are affecting people of all ages and at all levels of education and financial status. Reported losses from elder fraud are growing rapidly, totaling $4.9 billion in 2024, up 43 percent from 2023. And we say “reported” losses because many people are reluctant to report fraud, embarrassed that they got taken advantage of.
But the criminals behind these scams aren’t stupid. They are sophisticated and trained in what to say and do to psychologically rewire your brain at that moment and make it very hard to think. They play on emotions, and once emotions are involved, reason takes a backseat. Making many victims do things that, in the light of day, when the fog clears, they never would have done.
And that is exactly what happened to Paula S., of New Mexico, who lost her husband of 46 years in 2022. She shared her story during a recent AARP Fraud Summit, which included community leaders, particularly in the financial and law enforcement arenas. The Summit was designed to begin conversations on how to prevent fraud.
They had married in college, so she never lived on her own. She kept busy with volunteering and spending time with friends. But after three years, she still felt something was missing.
So she researched dating sites, deciding on one she felt would be safe. One man caught her eye and soon they were conversing through the site, which led to telephone calls and emails. With the relationship escalating quickly, they soon agreed to meet.
Then the excuses started: he had to attend a conference. The conference led to a job opportunity managing an oil rig. He would come soon but couldn’t come just yet.
“We continued to talk several times a day. He started each day writing an email about how much I meant to him and how happy he was that I came into his life,” Paula said. “These were exquisitely worded emails to which I would spend up to an hour every morning responding. He was very romantic and attentive. He emotionally bared himself to me and I reciprocated.”
But there was a hitch – to win the bid to manage the oil rig, the company needed him to show his bank statements proving he had $3 million in his account. He did not.
“He spent the next week hitting up family and close friends for money. I hoped and prayed he would not ask me, but he did. I refused at first, but he wore me down,” she said.
She gave him $270,000 from her retirement fund on his promise that “investment” would quickly turn into millions of dollars and that her money would be safe. Even sending her an extremely large check to keep for future cashing.
Again, they planned to meet during his weeks off, but an emergency on the rig forced them to postpone.
At the same time, while all this was occurring, they had kept their relationship secret, in part at his request. But the constant cancellations were starting to get to Paula.
“I kept my hopes up. We continued our routine calls and texts, deepening our feelings for each other to include marriage. He started to call me his wife. As he said, it was the only way he could honor what I meant to him,” she said.
Several months into the relationship, Paula was in love, finding something she felt she had been missing, and, in her euphoria of new love, broke her promise and told some friends about this new man, someone she had still not yet met in person. Her friend worked in IT and, concerned, did some research into the man’s background, just to be safe and found nothing – no trace of the company the man claimed to own. His “company website” was set up a month before they met online.
Paula confronted the man, who denied he was scamming her. They broke off contact, but it didn’t last long. She thought of the large check she had and it gave her hope that he was who she thought he was. (Later she would learn that although the check was written on actual check material, it was bogus.)
But soon he was asking for more money and back to her financial advisor she went, who told her she was shortening her retirement fund by five years. It was the wake-up call she needed.
“I realized I was lying to everyone I knew in order to protect a man I had never met. I wrote him an email saying I could no longer continue and blocked him once and for all,” Paula said.
“It wasn’t until later that I began to understand the psychological manipulation I had experienced, causing me to gloss over what should have been red flags. How he had set me up, taken advantage of my kind and trusting nature and my vulnerability and was giving me everything he thought I needed to stay with him,” she said.
Paula added that one of the reasons that she agreed to keep the relationship secret was that she so badly wanted it all to be true.
She not only lost the $270,000 she had given to the man, but also, because of the early withdrawal from her retirement account, she now owed the IRS $82,000 in taxes. She had to go back to work to pay the tax bill.
Paula’s story is not uncommon. She quickly learned this through the AARP Fraud Watch Network after joining one of its support groups.
“Hearing men and women talk about their experiences, I quickly realized I was not alone. That it was not some failure in me.”
“I am sharing my story because it needs to be known that it (fraud) is a virus affecting our country. Not only for seniors, but to all of us. If I can have one person not take the bait or have one predator found out, it is worth the pain I went through,” Paula said.
To learn more about fraud prevention or what to do if you are a victim of fraud, visit the AARP Fraud Watch Network at https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/about-fraud-watch-network/
To see Paula’s full story visit https://youtu.be/8ZVW_8CPqUA
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