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.Kids battling cancer sworn in as honorary police officers for Childhood Cancer Awareness Month “There was always a request for Tony,” Kleinert said. “Needed better food where he was. He needed a better signal to be able to call me. He needed to bribe someone to be able to get better food or what have you.”“My cellphone got turned off every month until I could scrape together money to get it turned back on. And my electricity had been turned off,” she said. “I went through my savings, my 401K, my husband’s, the rest of his life insurance.
It was at that moment that Kleinert realized she had been scammed. At that point, she had lost around $39,000. As for Tony, Kleinert said she eventually found out he wasn’t a doctor or the man she saw in the picture on Facebook. Instead, he was a 55-year-old Nigerian man.Theresa Payton, a cyber security expert, told NBC10 that just about anyone is vulnerable to skilled scammers.
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