In 2025, Americans age 60 or older reported losing $584 million to
romance scams – a 50% increase from losses reported the previous year,
according to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. Authorities
believe the loss figure is probably considerably higher, because many
scams go unreported by victims who are embarrassed to ask for help. This
growing exploitation of our older population is infuriating. No one
should lose his or her life savings to someone pretending to care about
them. That’s why the Ohio Attorney General’s Office has gone on the
offensive to combat these crimes.
The resources provided here, including the video at right in which
the attorney general explains our Romance Impostor Scams Forensic
Initiative, are yours to use and share in whatever way works best for
your purpose.
A
Florida man pleaded guilty yesterday in the Southern District of
Florida to money laundering for his role in funneling the proceeds of
scams against American consumers and businesses to co-conspirators
located in Nigeria.
Niselio Barros Garcia Jr., 50, of Kissimmee, was indicted by a grand
jury on July 12, 2023. According to court documents, Garcia supplied
bank accounts to his co-conspirators for the purpose of receiving
proceeds from romance scams, business email compromises and other fraud
schemes. After receiving the criminal proceeds, Garcia used a
cryptocurrency exchange to conceal and transfer the funds in Bitcoin to
co-conspirators in Nigeria. Garcia personally laundered over $2.3
million of criminal proceeds and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars
in fees.
Business email compromises involve criminals hacking or spoofing
business email accounts to initiate fraudulent money transfers. Romance
scams involve fraudsters creating fake online personas to gain the trust
and affection of victims, leading to financial exploitation. These
schemes not only cause significant financial losses, but also deeply
impact the lives of victims.
“This prosecution demonstrates our ongoing commitment to protecting
the public from complex financial crimes,” said Principal Deputy
Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton, head of the Justice
Department’s Civil Division. “This case serves as a reminder of the
sophisticated methods employed by criminals and the need for vigilance
in the digital age. The Justice Department remains committed to
aggressively pursuing individuals and groups involved in these kinds of
illicit activities.”
Garcia is scheduled to be sentenced in the Southern District of
Florida on April 23. He faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. A
federal district court judge will determine any sentence after
considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
Four additional defendants have been charged in this scheme but remain at large.
The FBI Buffalo Field Office investigated the case.
Trial Attorneys Lauren Elfner and Matthew Robinson of the Civil Division’s Consumer Protection Branch are prosecuting the case.
If you or someone you know is age 60 or older and has been a victim
of financial fraud, help is available at the National Elder Fraud
Hotline at 1-833-FRAUD-11 (1-833-372-8311). This Justice Department
hotline, managed by the Office for Victims of Crime, is staffed by
experienced professionals who provide personalized support to callers by
assessing the needs of the victim and identifying relevant next steps.
Case managers will identify appropriate reporting agencies, provide
information to callers to assist them in reporting, connect callers
directly with appropriate agencies and provide resources and referrals
on a case-by-case basis. Reporting is the first step. Reporting can help
authorities identify those who commit fraud, and reporting certain
financial losses due to fraud as soon as possible can increase the
likelihood of recovering losses. The hotline is open Monday through
Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET. English, Spanish and other
languages are available.
Con artists are using dating sites to prey on lonely people,
particularly older ones, in a pattern that accelerated during the
isolation of the pandemic, federal data show.
By Emily Schmall
Con artists are
using dating apps to prey on lonely people, and older ones are a growing
target. In a pattern that accelerated during the isolation of the
coronavirus pandemic, romance scams claimed $139 million from adults age
60 and older in 2020, according to data from the Federal Trade
Commission, up from $84 million the year before.
In
one of the more alarming episodes of what has become a leading type of
fraud aimed at older Americans, a Holocaust survivor was swindled out of
his life savings of nearly $3 million, according to a federal indictment unsealed in New York last week.
How do romance scams work?
Alone
at home as Covid-19 spread in the summer of 2020, Kate Kleinert decided
to accept a Facebook friend request from a handsome stranger. He
described himself as a Norwegian doctor working in Iraq and called
himself Tony.
After a couple of months
of daily communication on encrypted messaging apps, Tony began asking
for money. By December 2020, Ms. Kleinert, 69, had given Tony and two
people claiming to be his children some $39,000 in gift cards. The scam
devoured Ms. Kleinert’s savings, her late husband’s life insurance,
her pension and her income from Social Security, leaving her destitute.
Ms. Kleinert, who was living in
Glenolden, Pa., outside Philadelphia, at the time and now lives in
Lancaster County, went to the local police and then the state police.
She was told that there was nothing they could do.
“The loss that hurts the most is losing his love and losing the family that I thought I was going to have,” she said.
Ms. Kleinert’s scammer followed a typical playbook, experts said:
claiming to be a professional working abroad; exploiting a
victim’s loneliness to quickly establish a bond; building an imagined
future with them; and then planning an in-person meeting that depended
on the victim’s willingness to part with money.
“I’ve seen elders mortgage their houses, borrow large sums of money from
their neighbors, empty out their retirement accounts,” said Michael
Delaney, a Chicago-based lawyer who specializes in elder law.
“It
is absolutely astonishing to me how much money someone can get out of
an elderly person’s account before anyone really notices and puts a stop
to it,” he said.
Peaches
Stergo, the woman charged with wire fraud in the federal case involving
the Holocaust survivor, extracted some $2.8 million from the victim, an
87-year-old Manhattan man whom she met on a dating website. Federal
prosecutors said she used some of the money to pay for a condominium in
Florida, rooms at the Ritz Carlton, gold bars, a Corvette and luxury
watches and clothing.
The median loss
from a romance scam for people 70 and older in 2021 was $9,000,
according to the F.T.C., compared with $2,400 across all age groups.
“When
older adults lose money,” said Amy Nofziger, the director of fraud
victim support for the AARP, “they lose more money because they have
more money to lose.”
Section
230 of the Communications Decency Act gives online platforms, including
dating sites and apps, immunity from liability for content posted by
their users.
The F.T.C. sued
Match Group in 2019, alleging that the company, which runs online dating
platforms like Match.com, Tinder and Hinge, was allowing fraudsters to
disguise themselves as normal daters.
A federal court in Texas dismissed the claims last year, citing Section 230.
Still, in recognition of the problem, Match Group rolled out a public awareness campaign earlier this month alerting users of red flags.
While
Section 230 makes it hard to sue online platforms over the content they
host, individuals can be held legally liable if they willingly become
part of a conspiracy to defraud.
Glenda
Seim, an 81-year-old Missouri woman, was sentenced last year to five
years of probation after pleading guilty to two federal felonies. She
admitted that she had acted as a “money mule” on behalf of an online
love interest, a man claiming to be an American working in Nigeria in
need of money to return home.
She
pawned electronics sent to her home and set up fraudulent bank accounts,
ignoring federal agents who told her that she was being scammed.
What can you do if you suspect you or a loved one are being scammed?
Ms.
Seim’s reluctance to accept that her online romance wasn’t real is
common among older victims of this variety of fraud, Mr. Delaney, the
elder-law specialist, said.
“Despite
showing incontrovertible evidence that the person they think they’re in
love with isn’t who they say they are and the money isn’t being used for
what they say it’s being used for, they will defend that exploiter
through anything,” he said.
Usually, he added, one of the victim’s grown children must step in to put a stop to it.
This
is what happened in the wire fraud case involving the Holocaust
survivor in New York. By the time the victim confided in his son, the 62
checks he had written over the course of four years had been cashed.
Still,
investigators were able to arrest Ms. Stergo — an unusual outcome in
internet romance scams, where perpetrators are rarely found and losses
are almost never recoverable.
While
there is little recourse for recovering funds that in most cases have
already been spent, a family member’s involvement can often halt a
scam before it goes any further. In instances where older people refuse
to accept that they have been victims of a scam, family members can file
an emergency petition for temporary guardianship and ask a judge to
issue an order that will immediately freeze bank accounts.
As
Ms. Kleinert found, there is little that law enforcement can do to
track down online scammers, particularly those operating from foreign
I.P. addresses.
After losing all of
her money, Ms. Kleinert turned to the young people in her life to
tighten her online privacy settings. But after a fire destroyed her home
and a friend set up a GoFundMe page to help her, she found she was
still vulnerable.
After months of silence, she said, Tony got back in touch to ask for more money.
“‘I know you have money,’” she said he told her, “‘I saw your GoFundMe page.’
Romance fraudsters targeting seniors surged during the pandemic, the Senate Aging Committee was told getty
Romance scams surged for seniors during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Senate Aging Committee was told today.
Losses reported to the Federal Trade Commission alone by the elderly
from phony suitors rose to $139 million last year from $84 million in
2019.
The loneliness and isolation during the pandemic made the elderly
particularly vulnerable because they were longing for human contact and a
friendly voice on the phone or a beckoning message on Facebook became
harder to turn away from, said Aging Committee Chair Bob Casey (D-PA).
“Social isolation isn’t new for seniors, but the pandemic made it
that much worse. Fraudsters saw an opportunity and pounced.,” the
Senator said.
He added decrease in contact from family and friends made it easier
for small scams even now to balloon into big scams including peddling
fake cures and stealing funds.
Speaking to the large increase in romance scam perpetrators targeting
the elderly, the Ranking Republican on the Committee, Senator Tim Scott
of South Carolina noted seniors are isolated and lonely and may be more
susceptible to this type of fraud and this type of scam.
Romance scams were the biggest source of fraud reported to the FTC by the elderly in the 60-69 and 70-79 age groups.
The frauds were an important driver of the doubling of bank transfers
and payments by older adults in 2020, and reports of cryptocurrency
payments more than tripling,
FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Associate Director Lois Greisman told the Aging Committee hearing.
The FTC official added many people reported that romance scammers
used the pandemic to explain requests for money or their inability to
meet in person.
She explained in romance scams fraudsters create fake profiles,
establish trusting relationships, and then trick consumers into giving
or loaning them money.
Romance scams were among the frauds causing the highest losses for
seniors, National Consumer Law Center Attorney Odette Williamson said:
“Widespread illness and death combined with the social isolation and
distancing measures brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic created fertile
ground for the proliferation of certain scams primarily aimed at older
adults.”
The Better Business Bureau Institute for Marketplace Trust found
romance scams romance scams were the riskiest types of fraud during the
pandemic for people 55 through 64.
Making romance scams particularly difficult, Senator Rick Scott
(R-FL) said it’s difficult for law enforcement to find the perpetrators.
Kate Kleinert, a victim who testified at the hearing, claimed she reported the fraud to police but they wouldn’t listen to her.
The widow told the Committee she was frustrated by the lack of
options she had to recover the $39,000 she gave the suitor imposter or
the ability to hold him responsible.
“$39,000 to some people is not much, but for someone in my position
it’s a great deal. I am still paying for that today because I can’t get
things repaired at the house. I’ve had no air conditioning this summer,
my refrigerator is off, and my stove is off, the victim relayed.
She said the loss that hurt her most wasn’t the money, but “losing
his love and losing the family I thought I was going to have and what my
new future was going to be.”
