WASHINGTON, United States — For years,
Debby Montgomery Johnson didn’t tell
anyone she’d been scammed out of more than $1 million by a man with whom she
believed she was in a loving, though virtual, relationship.
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“It should not
have happened to me,” the business owner and former Air Force officer told AFP
from her home in Florida, a common refrain among those defrauded by someone
they met online and grew to trust.
But many tens of
thousands of people are targeted by cons dubbed “romance scams” every year,
their numbers skyrocketing during the COVID-19
pandemic when lockdowns sent
people flocking to the internet seeking a salve for isolation.
The US Federal Trade Commission, tracking scams reported to its Consumer Sentinel Network,
said 2021 saw a record $547 million stolen in romance scams. This marked a
nearly 80 percent increase compared to the year before.
Those figures cap
an upward trend that leapt in the first year of the pandemic. People reported
to the FTC losing $1.3 billion to the scams over the past five years, the most
of any fraud category.
But it is just the
tip of the iceberg, the FTC notes, as the vast majority of cons go unreported.
Tim McGuinness,
founder of the non-profit
Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams (SCARS), said numbers soared because of “the isolation, the loneliness and the
utilization of the web as virtually the exclusive communication tool” during
the pandemic.
COVID-19 offers
new ruses
Canceled dates
over supposedly positive COVID-19 tests and disrupted travel plans due to
lockdowns are ruses that feed into the well-worn script of romance scammers,
the FTC warned.
One male victim
told awareness-raising organization Silent Victim No More that COVID measures
provided his supposed girlfriend with excuses to “bail out.”
“COVID-19
benefited the scammers,” he wrote.
He finally did a
reverse image search on photos she had sent, discovering they were of a
different person — but only after he’d spent $400,000 on visa fees and other
concocted urgent costs.
While awareness is
growing — through support groups, online forums, and even a recent documentary
on Netflix “
The Tinder Swindler” — many still fall prey to elaborate cons spun
to get into a victim’s heart.
When Montgomery
Johnson, now in her early 60s, realized the scale of the problem, she decided
to share how she was taken advantage of by a man who had come to feel like
“family” over two years starting in 2010.
She spoke widely,
wrote a book — “The Woman Behind the Smile” — and joined the board of SCARS,
which has had contact with some seven million victims since 2015.
“I was looking for
a confidant,” she said, having waded into online dating following the death of
her husband.
She said it was
out of character to give money the way she did, but “he really had my
heartstrings tugged.”
“It’s expert manipulation,” said McGuinness, who
himself was a victim of a romance scam. Interactions “will progress like a
normal conversation, except that they’ll utilize very specific manipulative
techniques to begin the grooming.”
Scammers, many based
in
West Africa, will adopt fake identities, often saying they work abroad and
travel a lot or are in the military — providing ready-made excuses for why they
can’t meet in person.
A period of
intense contact is followed by requests to wire money for plane tickets, visa
fees, medical expenses, or other emergencies — always with the promise of
paying the amount back when they are finally united.
The internet was
already a low-cost, high-return field, but scammers, often working in teams,
now hunt everywhere from Instagram to online games like Words with Friends.
“Any place where
you can begin a conversation with someone, that’s where the scammers are,”
McGuinness said.
‘Nobody was talking’
Another change has seen more young people being caught up, with the FTC
saying the number of reports by Americans aged 18 to 29 increased more than
tenfold from 2017 to 2021.
The rise in
cryptocurrency is fueling scams involving bogus investments, though untraceable
gift cards and wire transfers are still more common.
McGuinness said
millennials are “scammed more often and for smaller dollar amounts” while older
people are scammed “for larger amounts but less frequently.”
Victims often
still keep their experiences under wraps, fearing scrutiny, and judgment.
In the years after
being scammed, Montgomery Johnson heard of many more people who had suffered
similar fraud, “but nobody was talking.”
“Something flipped
within me that it’s not about me anymore,” she said. “It’s about what I can
do... to speak up and to be the voice of the survivor.”
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