A widow lost $39,000, her house, and six dogs after a scam. ‘If the story wasn’t so horrible, people wouldn’t pay attention’

It started after a teenage girl sent a panicked email about getting her period while at school. 

That desperate SOS—one every woman knows well—went from England to Pennsylvania, where Kate Kleinert, a widow who lived alone outside Philadelphia with her six hospice dogs, read it. Kleinert’s heart went out to the girl, who referred to her as “Mom” and was the daughter of a single-dad friend named Tony who Kleinert had been chatting with. Kleinert ran out and picked up a gift card and texted images of the front and back. She sent $100 so the girl could pick up what she needed from the school store. That single gesture kicked off a series of events in which Kleinert was bilked out of the nest egg she saved from her career and husband’s life insurance after she took time off to care for him in the years before he died. She eventually lost her home in an electrical fire after she was unable to scrape together the money to get a handy man in to fix her air conditioner. Kleinert, then in her late 60s, tried to extinguish the flames but she eventually had to flee the house in fear for her life. Her home burned to the ground. None of her dogs made it out in time.

In Michigan, the man who exploited Beth Hyland never even asked her for money. 

“Richard” sought Hyland’s help logging into his bank account while he was abroad. He and Hyland had bonded over their separate emotional journeys and had planned to meet around the holidays where Hyland lived in Michigan. In a bind, Richard—who claimed to be a French national working as a construction contractor in Qatar—shared the username and password to his bank login and when Hyland pulled up his information on her laptop, his balance showed he had about $700,000 in cash parked in the account. He walked her through transferring his funds so he could pay a lawyer and a translator while he was finalizing a $10 million payment for a massive job overseas. The next day, they were both locked out of the account but Richard needed another $20,000 so he could finalize the transaction before flying to spend the holidays with Hyland in Michigan. She wanted to help so Hyland took out a $15,000 loan from the bank, and got a $5,000 cash advance. She sent that plus $1,000 she had on hand through a Bitcoin ATM with Richard’s constant support via text and a video explaining how to move the funds. He stole every cent. 

Jackie Crenshaw got a check for $100,000 in the mail from “Brandon,” a man she first met on a dating app called BLK that is marketed to African Americans. Brandon had sent her little trinkets in the past, like a pillow with their photos, coffee mugs emblazoned with their names, pizza to her condo when she worked late, and then chicken dishes when he discovered Crenshaw didn’t particularly care for Domino’s. Concerned, Crenshaw brought the check to the police who waved her away and told her to buy a Mercedes and enjoy. She also called the bank that issued the check and they assured her it was legitimate. So she deposited the money and soon after, Brandon began planning a big 60th birthday bash on a yacht for her and her friends—after Crenshaw passed the crucial age threshold of 59½ when she would no longer incur a 10% penalty for withdrawing money from her 403(b) retirement fund. Crenshaw was conned out of about $1 million in total and her condo, which she had purchased in 1992 and finished paying off after 26 years of mortgage payments, has been in foreclosure for the past year.

Michael Rod, an FBI supervisory senior agent in California who leads an elder justice task force focused on fraud, said his team has encountered lawyers, doctors, judges, and pilots who have lifetimes of professional experience—like Crenshaw, Hyland, and Kleinert—who have been victimized in similar schemes. 

“These scammers do this for a living, all day, every day, and anyone who devotes that much time to it is going to be good at their tradecraft,” said Rod “It’s really quite simple; they prey on both the trust and loneliness of the victim. That’s the key to it.”

In 2024, the FBI logged $16.6 billion in total fraud losses, a 33% jump from the year before. Crypto-related fraud alone accounted for $9.3 billion, a 66% increase, with adults over 60 losing more than any other age group. Romance scams, which fall into a broad bucket that includes long-term fraud schemes that rely on building trust with victims and include what experts call “bromance” scams involving friends who claim to be helping their professional circle invest successfully, have grown into a flourishing vector to broader crypto and investment scams. These include ponzi-like schemes, crypto frauds, and money muling, in which a victim unwittingly accepts funds that have been coerced and pooled from other victims before shuttling them into other accounts, laundering the money for crime rings typically located in West Africa and Southeast Asia, although fraud can start anywhere around the globe. The targets are often closely researched and tracked beforehand and the schemes themselves have been honed to an incredibly successful point. 

“People really need to know that so many of these scams now involve the supposed romantic interest directing you to invest,” said Emma Fletcher, senior data researcher at the Federal Trade Commission. “They don’t think they’re sending money to a scammer at all—they just think they’re taking advice from someone they trust.”

The fraudsters often push heavily for romance and emotional connection, piling on the compliments and open affection. Crenshaw had 20,000 text messages from “Brandon,” who asked her to pray together every day. Kleinert hardly even considered dating—and she never accepted connection requests from people she didn’t know. Hyland’s scammer constantly told her he loved her and called her “my queen,” and “my love.” She now believes he did that so he wouldn’t get confused and call her the wrong name since he was likely grooming dozens of victims at the same time. 

A book sold on Amazon.com for $6.99 in paperback and $1.99 on Kindle, “How to Make a White Woman Fall In Love with You from Online Chat,” advises would-be criminals to target women who are single and over 40 and to carefully research them to find out their work history, hobbies, and pets, and to commit those key details to memory. It directs fraudsters to ask women questions about themselves and to note the answers so you can bring them up later in conversation. It advises not using AI too much so that the connection will feel more authentic to victims but to run messages through Grammarly for proofreading so they appear polished and professional. It also tells criminals to listen more than they talk to push victims to keep their guards down. 

“Plenty of people have told her she is beautiful, but there is a way you can tell her that is totally different and will make her love you,” the author writes. He also includes lists of questions and key phrases to use such as, “I can’t believe I found someone like you. I love making you laugh. You’re my best friend. I’ll always have your back.”

‘I would go to sleep at night dreaming about him. And it’s all fake’

The cocktail of emotion, affection, and love bombing can be intoxicating. Kleinert thinks there must be some sort of Stockholm Syndrome at play that deserves to be researched, and Hyland described it as almost feeling hypnotized. 

“It was like being overdosed on your own brain chemicals,” she said. “It all made sense at the time, but looking back now, none of it makes sense.”

The experience for victims can be brutal and leaves them open to judgement, condescension, and blame—despite the well-established success of similar fraud schemes even on the largest of Fortune 500 businesses. Meanwhile, the impact is both financial and emotional for individuals. Victims have been driven to suicide and suicidal ideation from the deep trauma. Kleinert said when she discovered that Tony, who made her fall in love with him and believed they were getting married, wasn’t real, it was “soul crushing.”

“You almost have an out-of-body experience and you go, ‘How the heck could you have fallen in love with somebody that you haven’t even met? Do you understand how dumb that sounds?’” said Kleinert. “The vetting this guy did, the grooming he did. He knew what to say and when to say it and he said beautiful things to me all the time. And yes, I fell in love with him. And I was happy. And it felt wonderful. I would go to sleep at night dreaming about him. And it’s all fake.”

Experts say it’s very difficult for victims to get justice or see their money—stolen under false pretenses—clawed back. And the stigma around these types of scams and the shame among victims has led to significant underreporting, even as the scourge of AI-enabled identity theft, deepfaked video and audio, and financial fraud preys on both individuals, executives, and companies alike via iterations of the same scheme. 

Last month, a 45-year-old Chinese national was sentenced to four years in prison for laundering $37 million in a sprawling scheme that drew in 174 American victims who were targeted through social media and online dating sites. A 42-year-old man in Los Angeles, Daren Li, was sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering in a case that stole $73.6 million from victims groomed after being contacted on dating and professional websites, authorities said. Li allegedly cut off his ankle monitor and remains a fugitive at large. A single victim in Boston who matched with a man who called himself “Nino” on Tinder was scammed out of half a million through a fraudulent trading platform. 

Victims over 60 years old are the most impacted demographic, according to the FBI, with 7,600 reported cases accounting for nearly $400 million in losses. The next-highest age group, 50 to 59, had about 2,300 victims and $82 million in losses. While the scale is staggering, official reports dramatically undercount the problem, authorities said. Fletcher said the FTC’s research found that fewer than 5% of victims report scams to the government or the Better Business Bureau. 

“That may be even more true of romance scams,” said Fletcher. “Sometimes people who are experiencing a romance scam, they may never accept that it was, in fact, a scam.”

Rod said his team has found, when they execute search warrants in investigations, that as few as one in 15 or 20 victims have reported the crime. When the FBI intervenes directly, victims will often resist. 

“We will show up with data and say, ‘Here is the picture of the same guy with different names.’ We reverse image search it. We have reports from other victims—a person in Ohio, someone in Oklahoma, also sending money to the same account,” Rod said. “It’s really tough to get the romance victim to understand and agree they’re being victimized. They’re emotionally invested in that person.”

He never asked her for anything but her companionship

Scammers are precise and patient as they build trust through thousands of text AI-proofed text messages and deepfaked video calls before anything financial even comes into play—an often misunderstood aspect of these schemes that leads to victims feeling even greater shame in reporting them. 

Kleinert’s scammer, “Tony,” said he was a doctor stationed in Iraq with two children in an English boarding school. He claimed his former wife had died of leukemia and that he would love for a woman like Kleinert to be their stepmother. He never asked Kleinert for anything but her companionship as he learned the names of all six of her hospice dogs while they talked about their lives. He’d hear one making noise in the background on their calls and ask, “Is that Duffy? Is that Trixie?” It endeared him to her that he cared enough to learn and remember the dog’s names. 

“There was always a little nugget of plausibility in these things,” said Kleinert. “Where I would think, well, might it be that way?”

After the first $100 gift card, the requests came in small, understandable increments. After Kleinert helped out his daughter, Tony’s 12-year-old son wanted a gift card so he could buy a video game. Kleinert understood how kids can be; she has dozens of nieces and nephews. Eventually, Tony needed gift cards in Iraq for various reasons, to bribe someone because it was how things are done over there, or to get a better cell phone signal in the desert to call her. 

“Always legitimate,” said Kleinert. “It took me a long time to push and say, ‘You’re running me dry here.’” 

The scheme that ensnared Hyland took a different angle. “Richard” had talked about therapy, his own emotional journey, and how he had found happiness after his wife cheated with his best friend and his daughter died of leukemia. His texts validated and reaffirmed his feelings for Hyland constantly. When he shared his bank account information and what was going on with him, it felt collaborative, she said. 

“Every time I did something like this for him, I felt like we were working as a team,” she said. “Which is exactly what they’re going for. Trust.”

In Crenshaw’s case, after she got the $100,000 and she approached age 60, she withdrew her retirement savings and transferred it to what she believed was a crypto investment platform. She got fake—likely AI-generated—statements weekly showing gains of thousands of dollars a week. Brandon spent nearly $80,000 planning her birthday bash with 135 guests, sparklers, and a 360-degree photo booth. Weeks before the party, an anonymous caller phoned the police to tell them Crenshaw was a victim in an elaborate fraud. When the detective called her, Crenshaw initially denied it. Then, she sat in her house for hours, completely unable to move. 

“The earth fell beneath me,” she said. Crenshaw described it as feeling like a part of her was stolen and her trust has been irreparably broken.

Her retirement savings are gone and she owes taxes on the withdrawal because it added to her taxable income with the IRS. Soon after she found out what was really going on, Crenshaw found herself in a grocery store and sampled some smoked gouda. She asked the associate how much it cost and realized she couldn’t afford the $8 dollars for cheese. For a woman who spent her entire life building a career in the medical field and managing dozens of people, it was a stunning moment to realize she couldn’t do this for herself.

“When I think about someone who prays with you every day, if that’s not deception and the devil and pure evil,” she said. “Who would pray with somebody if it wasn’t for real?”

Scam avengers strike back

The story doesn’t end when the money runs out. But Crenshaw, Hyland, and Kleinert aren’t staying silent and they are part of a growing cohort that is speaking out about romance fraud schemes.

A perfect example is Patsy Roach, 63, in St. Louis, who goes by “PinkLady” online, has become a well known scam avenger and runs nightly live sessions online where she engages criminals, strings them along, and collects their bank account information and CashApp handles so she can report them to law enforcement. She wears wigs to disguise herself and calls her alter ego, “Suzanne Sugabaker” after Delta Burke in the TV series Designing Women. She teases the criminals to their faces and warns women about fake profiles online, including a recent fake of Lisa Evans, the mother of Hollywood megastar Chris Evans. 

Much like the way the fraud schemes work on victims, Roach gets criminals hooked before she drops the hammer by calling them out. “You can’t out-crazy me,” said Roach. “You really can’t.”

She reads “How to Make a White Woman Fall in Love with You from Online Chat” aloud to criminals as sweet talk to the men who have tried to use it on her and others.

“My whole goal is to educate everybody so they don’t fall for this,” said Roach. “Hear how they talk. How quickly they fall in love with you. I tell everybody—they don’t love you. They love your money.”

Kleinert founded the Unbreakable project after being inspired to learn that in Norway, trauma units are sent to victims when they report these crimes. She crochets blankets and sends them to police stations with a personal letter and list of resources for victims in a package called, “Kate’s Hugs.” It’s meant to humanize the victim for law enforcement and for the victim to feel seen and comforted through a source of support. She also speaks to law enforcement about her experience.

“I truly believe God has asked me to go through this, so that I can do this work,” said Kleinert, who now lives in a senior apartment and drives around Amish friends for a bit of extra money when distance are too far for horse-and-buggy trips. “If the story wasn’t so horrible, people wouldn’t pay attention.”

Hyland wrote a book about her experience and started an LLC called “A Voice for Unrequited Love,” which is dedicated to education about the mechanics of fraud. She has also studied the neurochemistry of manipulation and how these schemes trigger dopamine responses in victims, then oxytocin to build trust, while suppressing serotonin to breed obsessive thinking. 

Crenshaw has spoken at the Aspen Institute and FBI headquarters. She works as a fraud fighter with the AARP and testified in Connecticut in support of a bill that takes effect this summer that allows authorities to confiscate stolen crypto and allocates more funding to police for fraud education. Her anthem is a lyric from Beyonce Knowles: “You can’t break my soul.”

They do all this knowing that the predators are likely still keeping tabs on them.

In Kleinert’s case, she couldn’t afford to even bring in someone to repair her broken central air conditioning after her money was stolen, so she rigged a portable unit in her living room with an extension cord so she and her dogs could get through the heat. That July, she woke up around 5 am to discover both the cord and the unit were spitting flames across the room. The dogs ran to the back of the house while she tried beating out the flames. She didn’t want anyone to know what she was going through. But then the drapes caught and then the sofa. The window blew in. She had to run out into the street in her underwear in a neighborhood she lived in for 42 years. 

“My house burnt to the ground,” said Kleinert. “I lost every blessed thing I ever owned.”

Everything she had of her late husband’s, their collection of Christmas tree ornaments, their wedding photos—all of it. Friends started a GoFundMe page for her, and Tony called to ask for another $50 gift card. She told him everything she had was gone and he mentioned the balance from the fundraiser because he still watches her. And to this day, he still calls.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com