Inside the world of romance fraud
A scammer pretending to be Keanu Reeves hit her up. This author decided to hit back.
Keanu Reeves is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud
Becky Holmes Unbound
In 2022 alone, according to some estimates, singles looking for love online lost between $30 and $50 billion to scammers. Online romance scams come in many iterations. There are the Nigerian princes and the military personnel trying to get home; then there are the pig butchers, the Tinder swindlers, the Nigerian Yahoo Boys and their Ghanaian corollary, the Sakawa boys.
But there are also scams that don't have names yet.
It's enough to make a girl permanently delete her dating apps. And if you're anything like Becky Holmes, it might be enough to radicalize you.
Better known to her social media followers as @deathtospinach, Holmes discovered the dark underbelly of romance fraud but it began innocuously enough. She joined Twitter in 2020 early in the COVID pandemic. Like many, she was instantly bombarded with messages from “impossibly handsome men who were absolutely desperate to get to know me.”
At first, like most, Holmes simply blocked and reported them. But as she documents in her new book, Keanu Reeves is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud, out of a mixture of boredom and curiosity she began corresponding with these scammers, who were impersonating not only oil rig engineers and doctors but also celebrities. After Holmes started sharing her exchanges with these faux-celebrities — among them Reeves, Liam Neeson, Prince William and Elon Musk — with her growing audience, victims of these scams reached out with their stories. It is these stories, many of which ended in heartbreak and financial ruin, that form the backbone of Keanu Reeves is Not In Love with You.
The average reaction to online fraud victims is derision. It's fear of that reaction that keeps victims from speaking to the press or the police. Fortunately, Holmes, a self-described “technological dunce,” belongs to neither institution. Her expertise is delivered in homespun prose with pops of vulgar blue. At times, she veers into asides like the war lost against a source's Maine coon cat or her love for the Italian vermouth Cinzano.
There are benefits to this approach. Few professional writers could get away with describing a private detective and expert on the Sakawa Boys as “a well-dressed sexy bugger with eyelashes that any woman would pay thousands of pounds for.” And Holmes (who is British) is at her strongest when drawing on her relationships with the victims she's befriended.
Her prose radiates empathy, with none of the artificial distance that journalists or academics enforce between themselves and their subjects. The result is firsthand stories of women whose life savings were emptied because they had the audacity to desire love. Women who were largely left with little legal or financial recourse to recoup their losses because of the international and digital nature of most of these crimes, as well as the impotence of the government bureaus newly tasked with prosecuting them.
By the end of Keanu Reeves is Not In Love With You, Holmes's grasp of romance fraud, unpolished as it is, is undeniable. You sense her compassion. When Holmes learns of the thousands of people held captive in scam compounds in countries such as Cambodia, her bitterness at a state of affairs that allows this kind of human trafficking to go largely unpunished is clear. “We are well into the 21st century — how the hell is this happening?” she writes. There are dozens of answers to her question, running the gamut from sociological to geopolitical to philosophical. But Holmes emphasizes that those answers don't really matter to the victims of these crimes, or to those who, sometimes unwillingly, commit them.