By the time Margaret checked into a hotel room to finally meet Kevin Costner—the Yellowstone star she thought had fallen in love with her online—she had already wired him over $100,000 in bitcoin.
She’d packed her bags weeks earlier, left her husband of ten years, and believed she was about to start a new life as part of Costner’s mysterious new production company. Instead, she got a photo of a totaled car and a message: Costner wasn’t coming. He’d been in a crash.
As detailed in an excellent (and quite depressing) Hollywood Reporter feature by Rebecca Keegan, there was, of course, no crash. And there was no Costner. Margaret, a 73-year-old retired office manager, TED Talk speaker, and recent divorcee, was just the latest target in a booming industry of celebrity impersonation scams.
It’s a digital grift that preys on the lonely using a variety of modern-day tools that make deception as easy as could be, using a variety of social media platforms that don’t seem to care to protect their users from scam artists.
Romance scams cost Americans $672 million in 2024 alone. Older women like Margaret were among the hardest hit. These scams prey on parasocial affection that exploit the one-sided relationships we build with public figures.
That’s why scammers overwhelmingly impersonate older, “trustworthy” male celebrities like Keanu Reeves, Kevin Costner, and Jonathan Roumie, an actor you may not know by name but he’s hit it big in the Christian film world by playing Jesus in The Chosen, a series of now airing on Amazon Prime that chronicles the life of Jesus Christ.
Celebrity Romance Scamming Is an Out-of-Control, Billion-Dollar Industry
The gift’s intensity eventually scales up. There’s the introduction of fake family members, and then spirituality gets involved. The end goal is to so thoroughly emotionally manipulate its victims that they become isolated from their friends and family.
Or anyone who could potentially convince them that they are not being courted by a major Hollywood celebrity. If a person is successfully scammed once, their info is shared with other scammers, turning a victim into a repeat target.
To see how this all works, Keegan created a fake social media persona named Linda, a widowed 65-year-old with a terrier named Milo. She set the trap by following a variety of pop culture accounts. In less time than it takes to watch a single Kevin Costner epic, she was bombarded with DMs from fake Keanus, Costners, and a few random heartthrobs.
The most persistent was “Keanu_Reeves68667,” who begged for secrecy, tried to sell her a fake fan club membership, and used manipulated AI voice memos to impersonate the actor.
He was relentless. There’s an instinct to think this person is a monster, and deserving of all the worst punishments you can imagine. But the person doing this may also have been a victim. Just one of thousands of people who were trafficked into Southeast Asian scam compounds and forced to run social media cons for up to 16 hours a day against their will.
Many of the celebrities are very much aware that their likenesses are being used to scam their fans. Keanu Reeves does what he can to fight back. He pays a company called Loti to track down online impersonators and take them down. In the past year alone, Loti has issued nearly 40,000 takedown orders for Reeves impersonators alone and it’s still not enough.
The social media companies involved don’t make it very easy. According to Keegan’s reporting, Meta, the company that owns Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, takes days or even weeks to act, if it acts at all.
Meanwhile, Margaret’s story doesn’t have a happy ending. More of an ellipsis that doesn’t seem like it’s leading toward anything happy or healthy. Just more of the same. New impostors have slid into her DM’s.
Now she believes she’s dating Roumie, Jesus himself. Her sister can’t snap her out of it. The delusion runs too deep. Margaret is just one victim of thousands, then there doesn’t seem to be any way of helping them.
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