Scams that once bilked victims out of hundreds or even thousands of dollars are increasingly persuading them to move their investment and retirement accounts into phony investment schemes.
Norm Jones didn’t know where to turn.
What he thought was a whirlwind romance had fallen apart. The woman he had been talking with almost every day for five months wasn’t who she said she was. The $250,000 he had invested at her encouragement, his life savings and retirement, was gone. He would have to sell the house.
This wasn’t supposed to happen to him. Jones, 54, spent his career working in telecommunications and cybersecurity in the Silicon Valley area. Yet, he had fallen for an internet scam that experts say has grown more potent — and appears increasingly connected to self-harm.
In March, emergency personnel found Jones unconscious in his bathroom after he attempted suicide.
“My dad thought I was dead,” he told NBC News. “So did my brother and everyone.”
Jones is doing better. He’s recovering and said he wanted to share his story about what cybersecurity experts and suicide prevention advocates say is an underreported and pernicious issue: romance scams.
“I’d be happy to help just one person in the world never go through what I went through,” he said.
Romance scams trace back centuries and have been a mainstay of internet tricksters. But some scammers have devised methods so personally brutal and financially devastating that self-harm is a growing concern for victims.
Scams that once bilked victims out of hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars through gift cards are now increasingly convincing them to move their investment and retirement accounts into phony investment schemes. Those schemes have been boosted by the rise of cryptocurrency as both a tempting way to get rich quick and also as a mechanism for scammers to move large amounts of cash in ways that are almost impossible to retrieve.
“To me, it’s a public health crisis that I don’t think we’re talking about,” said Amy Nofziger, director of victim support for AARP’s Fraud Watch Network.
While the organization doesn’t log suicidal threats or deaths as a specific statistic, it has become “pretty much a daily occurrence” to refer a victim to a suicide hotline, she said.
The scam has two phases: Gain a victim’s trust by cultivating a fake romantic relationship for weeks or months, then convince them to pour money into a scheme that makes it appear they’re getting richer. In reality, their money’s already gone.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center categorizes these rackets as investment scams, also sometimes called “pig butchering” scams. An FBI report found that victims reported losing a total of $3.3 billion in 2022, more than double the reported losses in 2021.
The Federal Trade Commission tallied a record $496 million from romance scam victims last year, a spokesperson said. The FTC and the FBI reports rely entirely on what victims report to them, meaning they’re likely undercounted. There’s little other authoritative figures on the scam including information on victims’ demographics.
In April, the Justice Department announced a rare victory: It had seized virtual currency worth about $112 million linked to romance investment scams.
Erin West, a deputy district attorney who heads the high technology crimes unit in Santa Clara County, California, said that romance scammers are becoming “more and more masterful” at bilking victims out of every possible dollar.
“We describe it as a spell being cast over these victims. Despite hours on end with their banker or their children or a law enforcement official, they can’t be talked out of this,” she said.
The effects on victims are also becoming more severe, West said.
“The desperation is incredible. And we are seeing more and more victims threatening suicide, experiencing suicide attempts, checking themselves into psychiatric facilities because they’re feeling suicidal,” she said.
Jones’ scammer, who used the name Aranya, first messaged him on Facebook in November. He let his guard down when he saw that she was already friends with several of his Facebook friends.
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