Kate Kleinert said she lost around $39,000 to a romance scammer. She shared her story with NBC10 Responds.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, romance scammers stole $1.14 billion from Americans just last year. Yet experts say the amount may even be higher than that because many victims are too embarrassed to report the crimes as criminals get better and better.Kate Kleinert told NBC10 it started back in 2020 when she was browsing Facebook and a man named “Tony” sent her a friend request. Kleinert’s husband had passed 12 years prior.
A few days after meeting each other, Tony asked Kleinert to move to what is now known as Google Chat so that they could speak to each other.“It was just nice having a conversation with the man against just in every day,” she said. “Every night he would call and say, ‘How was your day, honey?’” Kleinert said they set December 10, 2020, as the date that they would meet. Tony was supposed to call when he landed at the airport.Tony never arrived, however. Kleinert got a call the next morning from someone who claimed Tony had been arrested at the airport.
Kleinert later shared her story with her family as well as law enforcement. She also struggled for years to recover financially, a struggle that was amplified when a portable unit she used to replace her broken air conditioner caught fire in the summer of 2022, destroying all her possessions and killing her six dogs.Eventually, Kleinert was able to buy a new home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, using the proceeds from her home insurance.
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