Don’t Be Duped
How fraudsters are taking advantage of COVID-19 to scam you By Lorri Malone
“I love you. You’re the best thing to come into my life...”
K
athleen (*not her real name) was smitten. She received multiple texts like this each day from her new beau. In her 60s and widowed in 2019 after more than 40 years of marriage, Kathleen found herself lonely during the months of COVID-19 quarantine. So, she turned to a Christian dating site just looking for someone to talk to. And she did find someone who was eager to talk to her, getting a match after just two days on the site. But the self-proclaimed charming, wealthy widower wasn’t who he said he was at all. He was an imposter, pretending to be German, but in reality, he was likely Nigerian and completely untraceable. Kathleen would later nickname him “The Devil” — but only after he’d spent nearly two months sweeping her off her feet and right into his web of lies, control, and deception, ultimately conning her out of $40,000. “All the things I thought were true, were just popped bubbles,” she said. “The truth just popped.” Kathleen was a victim of a romance scam, the most common scam in Kentucky and the nation as a whole, according to statistics from the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office of Senior Protection & Mediation. And that’s not the only scam being perpetrated against older adults. Scammers have taken advantage of the social isolation of COVID-19 to prey upon victims at an alarming rate. For the month of August, the Office reports the dollar losses from these scams increased by nearly 8,000 percent over the same month last year — from $2,984 reported in August 2019 to $237,398.85 in August 2020. PAGE 8 >>
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