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FBI reports 415 Mass. victims last year, taken for $21M
The story of Cindy Tsai — the Newton lawyer who told the Herald how she was taken for $2.5 million by an online scammer who gained her trust as she was dying of cancer — is not an isolated one, but a tragic example in the burgeoning romance scam racket, where the silver-tongued, sophisticated con artists of old have moved online.
Internet users have come a long way from the nascent days of the ’90s internet, when a sudden email from a “Nigerian prince” or similar character would crop up, duping the recipient into emptying their bank account to help the would-be royal out of some complicated financial jam for a promised exchange of tremendous monetary reward.
Netflix’s doc, “The Tinder Swindler,” which came out in February, detailed the story of the Israeli conman Simon Leviev who’s alleged to have used dating app Tinder to hook up with women looking for love only to emotionally manipulate them into taking out massive loans to support him. They thought he was in danger and needed the money, but their debt just bankrolled the elite lifestyle he lived and used to woo his next mark. Its popularity has helped bring the sophistication of the modern con to light.
The job of a scammer has always been to stay one step ahead of their possible marks, and in the modern age that means taking the personal touch of the oldfashioned street con and translating it into the modern world of global social media.
“Individuals who are looking for love and companionship are the target victims of romance scams, and anyone at any time can become a victim,” FBI Boston spokeswoman Kristen Setera told the Herald. “Typically, the perpetrators are men targeting women over 40 who are divorced, widowed, elderly or disabled. But scammers do not discriminate. The scam usually starts with an ‘innocent’ contact online and builds from there.”
Victims of online romance scams are second only to victims of email account compromise scams, a scam that primarily affects business email addresses. In those scams, the criminal often spoofs an email address the target does business with often — for example, switching just one letter in an email address of a representative of a supply company and sending a phony invoice to a target that outlays instructions for depositing the payment into a new bank account the scammer controls.
In Massachusetts last year, 553 people reported