They say love is blind. And now scammers are banking on it.
Romance scams — a type of con in which online fraudsters lead a person on with talk of romance (typically in the form of manipulative love-bombing) before eventually swindling them out of hard-earned cash — are on the rise, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
And so is pop culture’s fixation with them — as evidenced by the fascination surrounding Israeli con-man Simon Leviev, whose tale of using Tinder to emotionally manipulate hundreds of thousands of dollars out of women who ultimately take him down became fodder for Netflix’s British true-crime documentary and sleeper hit, The Tinder Swindler.
“It’s incredible to have a story where the women kind of triumphed, and where the women take control and where their action has a reaction,” director Felicity Morris tells Yahoo Life of the film, which she made largely as a cautionary tale.
It’s one that bears repeating: In 2021 alone, according to the FTC, the median individual reported loss due to romance scams was around $2,400, with a total reported loss of $547 million from romance scams, a nearly 80 percent increase over 2020. A similar report from the FBI found an even higher number, with an estimated total of $1 billion lost to romance scams last year — and…
