What are romance scams, who are victims, how do we protect ourselves?
FBI’s Herbert Stapleton speaks about romance scams: what they are, who are its victims, and how to stay safe.
Kelly Wilkinson, Indianapolis Star
After her husband died, former Indianapolis resident Rosalie Douglass slowly began looking to make a new romantic connection.
First, she worked with a local matchmaker, spending more than $3,000 with no luck finding compatible dates. At the recommendation of her cousin, she took the dive into the online world of dating.
As she filled out her profile, Douglass put “widow” as her relationship status. At the time, she didn’t realize that detail could make her a target for romance scammers. She wasn’t even aware such scams existed, or that people made profiles that weren’t real.
Over the course of about a year, Douglass quickly made not one, but two connections with men who ended up not being who or what they seemed. By the time she caught on, the widow had wired more than $430,000 to the scammers, draining most of her retirement funds, personal savings and forcing her to take a reverse mortgage out on her home.
Douglass is far from alone in the devastating experience.
In 2021, the year she filed her first fraud complaint with the FBI, there were 88,262 fraud victims over the age of 60. In 2023, that number grew to 101,068. Of those scams, 6,740 were romance scams.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, the amount of money lost to romance scams in 2023 accumulated to over $1.1 billion. Hoosiers lost $6.8 million to these scams in 2023, according to Social Catfish, a company that verifies online identities for daters by using reverse search technology.
Justin Lehmiller, a social psychologist and research fellow with the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, said participants like Douglass — older and out of the dating scene for decades — are vulnerable to romance scams because they are new to online dating or don’t know the red flags.
While seniors can be specifically targeted for their age, he said, romance scams can happen to anyone.
“One of the biggest warning signs to watch out for is whenever somebody asks you to invest money or share financial information … because that’s one of the telltale signs of these scams,” Lehmiller said.
Widow wades into ‘uncharted territory’ of online dating
Douglass and her husband, Joe, had been married for more than 40 years when he died in 2020. She described stepping back into the dating scene after so long as “weird,” calling it “uncharted territory.”
Her personal horror story started about a month after she signed up with the platform eDate in February 2021. She soon received a response from a man who identified himself as “Marcello Desmond.” They chatted on the dating site before moving off-platform to exchange emails, phone calls and text messages.
Desmond told Douglass he was a fund manager at an international private equity firm. He said he couldn’t wait to visit her in the U.S., but first he had business to finish in Dubai and then needed to visit his sick mother in Europe.
Less than a month into talking, Desmond mentioned he needed to transfer $13 million to a new bank account and asked to use her personal information. When Douglass initially refused, she said Desmond started crying and threatened suicide. That pushed her to change her mind.
“I finally said, ‘okay, no harm will come to me, my name, and address?’ And of course, he promised that no harm would come,” Douglass said.
After she gave him her information, official-looking documents started rolling into her inbox — like a letter from Desmond’s coworker saying that Desmond was her fund manager of the $13 million.
With the large sum, the couple planned on buying a house in the New Mexico city where Douglass had moved. She even started looking for real estate agents, with Desmond giving her a budget of $800,000 to find a home before his arrival.
But roadblocks kept popping up that stalled his visit — and the transfer of the $13 million funds.
Instead, she faced a flood of requests for new bank accounts to transfer money to, and new fund managers demanding payment of various fees, often with tight deadlines. Douglass still clung to Desmond’s no-harm promise, but started to become overwhelmed by all of the back and forth.
“It’s like a monkey jumped on my shoulder,” she said of the continuous string of new demands.
The demands for money kept coming
In April 2021, Desmond said he didn’t have access to money to pay a $15,000 set-up fee for one account because he had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on other fees. At his request, Douglass pulled money from her checking account and IRA to pay the fee.
But a little more than a month into the relationship, Douglass started growing concerned. She wrote to Desmond about her worries: What would the IRS think of this? Would she be audited?
Desmond placated her with love letters and appreciative messages, all the while pressuring her to pay the fund managers and fees.
Her family and friends also were concerned about her new relationship, but she pushed ahead — not ready to give up on another shot at love.
By May 2021, Douglass realized she hadn’t done much research on the banks to which she was wiring money. She looked up one, Commerce Swiss Bank, and found nothing. She researched its Zurich address, which led her to the name of a now-defunct German bank.
She messaged Desmond and accused him of scamming her. Then she blocked his number. In total, she said she lost around $25,000.
Desmond wrote back via email saying her concerns were in her head. He continued to reach out, asking for money for food and housing while he was supposedly in London. At that point, though, Douglass said she was ready to move on from Desmond.
She finds a new man on different site
Douglass placed a new profile on another dating site, Plenty of Fish, where she soon connected with a man who called himself “Lorensow William” in July 2021.
William said he was based in California and worked with a private equity company. He alluded to living a jetsetter lifestyle and having $5 million in stocks with the company.
At the beginning of their online relationship, Douglass confided that she was a widow. She also revealed that Desmond had scammed her out of $25,000. As she and William got to know each other on a deeper level, she was stunned to learn about the similarities between him and Desmond.
They both were widowers, had 20-year-old daughters in flight school abroad, European accents, sick mothers in Europe, traveled frequently and wanted to buy a house and create a new life with her in New Mexico.
Unsettled by the similarities between William and Desmond, Douglass emailed the firm where he claimed to work. She wanted to confirm his employment status, but didn’t hear back.
“You’re either the best damn scammer in the world,” she told William, “or you’re real.”
Soon after, William stepped up as her protector. He told her he researched Desmond and, before coming to be with her in New Mexico, he was going to London to meet with two men who had contacted her during her previous relationship with Desmond.
William explained it was shameful the fund managers scammed her. He cared about her and wanted to help get her money back. William followed that pledge by sending a photo of him with a man identified as “Willie Parkinson,” one of the men from Desmond’s scam.
Douglass said she felt a mixture of shock and anger at his change of plans.
“He’s gonna meet those idiots,” she thought, “but not come to see me?”
The other man from the previous scam, who used the name “David Poli Friedrich,” also re-engaged with her online. He told Douglass he received a partial payment of the transfer fee from William and asked her for $100,000 to finalize the $13 million transfer to her account.
William also messaged Douglass a copy of what he said was his employee ID from the company allegedly handling the transfer as proof that he worked there.
Douglass withdrew $85,000 from her IRAs, lying to her banks about why she needed the money. When the first bank’s fraud department got involved, she said the money was for her son’s honeymoon. She told the second bank, where she withdrew $25,000, that she was buying a second home in California.
Meanwhile, months after their breakup, Desmond continued messaging Douglass, this time on WhatsApp. She blocked him there as well.
In late August, she received an email informing her the investment firm where the $13 million was held now wanted a 5% “insurance charge” on the money.
By that point, her relationship with William had also become strained. She tried contacting him following the news about the insurance charge, and he ghosted her for four days. Eventually, he picked up the phone and told her he was depressed.
“There I was finding myself trying to make him feel better and telling him ‘this isn’t your fault,’” she said.
Family, friends grow increasingly concerned
After Douglass shared what happened with her cousin and best friend, they started a prayer campaign for her.
But she remained in contact with both Desmond and William. They were such smooth talkers, Douglass said, and sent convincing-looking documents. She also kept sending money.
William told her about a new financial venture and wanted Douglass to match his investment of $50,000.
Douglass agreed, lying to her bank again, and wired the $50,000. Within the next week, she had wired a total of $90,000 to the fund, but was running low on money. So she took out a $30,000 loan, ostensibly to pay for a car, family medical expenses and a gift for her son’s honeymoon.
By this point, she was relying on Social Security and a pension for income. A week later, at William’s urging, she withdrew around $25,000 more from an IRA.
Still, William told her he was running low on money. When Douglass told him she had reserved a flight to Zurich to visit him, she said he seemed elated.
But the next day, he told Douglass she needed to cancel the flight because his daughter, Lucy, got into a crash while flying in Spain. William sent her two photos: one of Lucy with a doctor and another of her in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask with her eyes closed.
Douglass shared her scuttled plans with her family, and her sister sarcastically noted the convenience of William needing to cancel so last minute.
Over the next three months, she sent William multiple prepaid gift cards totaling to over $5,000 to help him and his daughter. She also was getting pressure from the fund manager demanding the insurance fee for the $13 million fund.
The looming payment deadline prompted Douglass to take out a reverse mortgage on her home for more than $81,000. Around the same time, William said a co-worker ran away with everyone’s money from her most recent investments with him.
Undaunted, she wired $83,000 to cover part of the insurance premium on the $13 million account. By then, she was a little over a year into online dating experience and growing disillusioned about her relationship with Williams.
“I sent him a text. ‘Are you real? And do you really intend to meet me?’” she said. “He writes the next day and he’s embarrassed with that question but asked me to do him one more favor.”
He asked Douglass to help him travel to New Mexico so they could finally meet in person and be together.
Her family, however, was growing more concerned. Her son wrote a lengthy letter detailing the red flags from her relationship and information about scams.
When William asked her for another $500, Douglass told him she’d had enough. He couldn’t rely on her for money anymore. William called the next day, again saying he was planning to fly to New Mexico. She hung up on him, then sent an email saying she wouldn’t give him any more money.
William responded, saying he couldn’t believe how mean she was being to him and his daughter.
“So I texted back saying, ‘hey, you know what? I’m not an ATM,” she recalled. “And I reminded him you [had] so many chances to meet me but you always had an excuse.”
Douglass broke up with William in mid-April. They texted a few days later, and she found out that he was in Zurich. She told him of her plans to tell her son the entire story and reported him to the FBI for scamming her out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Douglass filed an Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) FBI report, naming all people — presumably aliases — the people used to scam her.
“It’s really hard to take yourself away from a scammer who made such an impression on you, emotionally. It was just a lot harder to take myself away from Loren because that went on for 8-10 months,” she said. “Here I was, still hoping to hear from him. I don’t know if I can even explain it to you.”
Eventually, she explained to her bank that she was scammed, and her financial advisor of over 20 years told her she wasn’t alone. He’d heard similar experiences from other people.
She told Plenty of Fish about him and his account was shut down. Douglass also filed an FTC report.
In August 2022, she was visited by a surveyor from the New Mexico Adult Protective Services for an interview. She shared what happened and, after submitting a report, she received a confirmation letter saying that she was scammed.
William continued sending messages to Douglass, trying to reel her back in again. In some romance scams situations, people struggle with believing they were lied to.
“Human beings have what social psychologists call a fundamental need to belong, which is to form meaningful connections with other people,” said Lehmiller of the Kinsey Institute. “When it seems like you have the seeds of connection taking place, we don’t want to lose that. No one wants to believe that someone else’s interest in them isn’t genuine, because that can be a major hit to your self-esteem.”
Douglass said she’s still struggling to move on from the scam. An accountant who was trying to help Douglass get tax relief for the year she was scammed died. Yet even into early 2024, Douglass said she was still receiving random calls from international numbers, which she blocked.
Money doesn’t mean much to her anymore, Douglass said, because she’s lost so much. After draining the majority of her retirement savings, Douglass now works part-time as a substitute teacher. On Monday nights, she tutors English as a second language and still drives her 2009 Honda with over 100,000 miles.
“I’m trying to build my future up again,” she said. “Because I’ve been through hell.”
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