Last year, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received nearly 18,000 reports of confidence/romance scams that resulted in losses of more than $672 million. Perpetrators of romance scams typically find their victims online, often through social media. They use a fake persona to deceive victims into trusting them or believing they’re interested in them romantically while making gradually increasing demands for money, which is usually sent by wire or cryptocurrency. The FBI says there was a record $9.3 billion in losses in the U.S. last year from scams involving cryptocurrency.
Romance scams can be especially costly for victims. The Columbian recently reported that between January 2021 and November 2024, Vancouver residents who were victims of romance scams lost an average of $112,000, according to the Vancouver Police Department. Sgt. Jay Alie, who oversees the VPD’s Property Crime Unit, says that while many romance scam victims are over the age of 60, people in their 30s and 40s have also fallen for them. Alie’s investigations of romance scams have widened beyond Vancouver to reveal other victims across the U.S. who’ve been ensnared in them, acting as middlemen to launder money for fraudsters whom they also believed they were in relationships with.
Sgt. Alie joins us for more details about these scams as they grow more sophisticated and shares how to protect yourself or vulnerable loved ones from them.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to romance scams. These are crimes in which scammers use fake personas to deceive victims into gaining their trust and affection before getting them to send money – lots of money. According to the FBI, confidence and romance scammers took in more than $670 million last year alone. That overall number is staggering, but the individual losses are perhaps even more so. As The Colombian reported recently, Vancouver police found that the average victim lost more than $110,000.
Sgt. Jay Alie oversees the Vancouver Police Department’s Property Crime Unit. He joins us now to talk about all this. It’s great to have you on the show.
Sgt. Jay Alie: Yeah, thank you for the opportunity.
Miller: How do these scams normally start?
Sgt. Alie: So there’s a lot of different types of scams. Focusing on just what the romance type scam is, usually people are online doing what people do online – Facebook, playing games, any other kind of social media – and they’ll receive some kind of an unsolicited message. “Hey, I saw your picture. You look beautiful, like to meet you,” type thing. And that starts a conversation.
Usually, the approach offers up a photograph, usually stolen from somebody else’s social media online, a relatively attractive person. They’ll claim to have a job overseas where they make a lot of money. They’ll start professing love really early. And then they’ll start having a series of tragedies in their life that they’re telling within their story, in which they ask people for money. Usually, it starts kind of low, builds itself up, but it’ll increase very quickly. And yeah, people will end up losing large chunks of money very quickly in this kind of scheme.
Miller: Very quickly. I’m curious how long this kind of grooming – if that’s the best word for it – this phishing part, goes on before scammers ask for money?
Sgt. Alie: So these are professional criminals and time is money to them. Usually, it moves very quickly to requests for money. These scams can go on though for years. I’ve had people who’ve been involved in these scams for three or four years in a row. Yeah, usually it’ll start out … “I work on an oil rig” is one of the typical stories. And that person will say, “Hey, I don’t have any phone service out here. Can you send me an Apple gift card for my phone service so we can keep talking?” And most people would do that pretty much for anybody.
Miller: Here’s $5 or $10.
Sgt. Alie: Well, yeah, $50 or $100.
Miller: Too low, even.
Sgt. Alie: They pay the phone bill for the month, and just to see if people will do it, right? And once they have a person doing that once, get them to do it a couple times. And then the story will be, “Hey, there was a tragedy on the rig, we all need to get shipped off of here. Can you send me money for a plane ticket and for a hotel room.” Or in some cases, they claim to be the owner of the oil rig and “Hey, now I have this insurance problem. Hey, I have this contract for $20 million. It’s gonna pay off next month. Can you loan me $100,000 so I can work out this legal issue?”
Miller: Do the victims that you are working with, eventually, do they have $100,000 to spare? I can’t get past that average amount – it’s staggering.
Sgt. Alie: It is pretty amazing. Yes, some people do have the resources and if they find out that you have resources, they’ll go after you very, very quickly. In other cases, people have sold their houses, people have cashed out their retirements, cashed out all their savings. It’s not uncommon for people to go broke, lose their homes.
Miller: One of the most striking numbers about this, in addition just to that overall $110,000 average, is that victims of romance scams lose about five times more money than victims of other kinds of financial online scams. Why do you think that is?
Sgt. Alie: A lot of the other scams are one-time propositions. You’ll get a link on your computer saying you had a computer issue and “your bank account’s been compromised,” you need to pull out all your money and send it to this crypto account so “we can protect it.” You lose money in one shot. Romance scams go for a while and the victim has this emotional connection to it. So once they get you going, they will convince a victim of ways to acquire money, to keep sending them money.
So the time span and the emotional commitment to it is really the difference. Most people, when they’ve been scammed in a different way, as soon as they lose the money, they start thinking, “oh, that didn’t sound right,” and they come to the police department. Victims of romance scams don’t recognize that something’s wrong.
Miller: How do you find out then?
Sgt. Alie: The banks will contact Adult Protective Services in Washington state and we usually get an alert from the bank, sometimes from the UPS person who sees an older person come in several times a month with boxes. Usually, the victim is told to tell a story: “I’m sending money to my grandson” or whatever. If you came into the UPS store two or three times in a month with a similar type of story, they’re pretty good about recognizing that that might be problematic.
Miller: So you have to rely on people seeing something suspicious and reporting it to you because, almost by definition, the victims of these scams don’t realize that they are victims of scams?
Sgt. Alie: Yeah, and most of the time when I contact them, they are adamant that they’re not being scammed.
Miller: Even if you bring some kind of evidence? What are those conversations like?
Sgt. Alie: That’s an interesting part of this work, actually. I speak to a lot of people who, when I bring it up, they’re either adamant that’s not what’s happening or they deny that they have any knowledge of it, even though they are clearly involved. I usually have to tell them, let me explain to you what this looks like and tell me if it resonates with you. And most people will respond to that.
I’ve found that empathizing with people’s situation, explaining it to them about how they’re being manipulated, works a lot better than, I don’t wanna say accusing, but they hear a lot. Other people usually notice, as family members. And they’ll say, “yeah, how could you be so stupid,” things like that, shame them. And people really put up a defense to that. When I talked to people about, “hey, you’ve been professionally manipulated by criminals and here’s how they did it,” people start to go, “oh yeah, that’s exactly what I feel like and that is what’s happening.”
Miller: But are there times, even when you say that, when people just keep saying “no” and they keep losing their money?
Sgt. Alie: Yes. One of my more colorful examples … We chased the money, so we ended up finding some downriver money in the hands of, what’s called a money mule in the system. But someone who is also being scammed had just received a packet of four checks for $200,000 each from a person in Texas. That person in Texas was being scammed. We recovered that money, sent it back to her and explained to her what’s happening. She got really upset that we intercepted the money, told us we had no business interfering in her relationship and I’m sure she sent the money back.
Miller: She sent $800,000 back, even though you had prevented her from losing nearly a million dollars, and she said, “no, I want to spend this money.”
Sgt. Alie: She was angry that we would interfere with it.
Miller: It reminds me, earlier this week, we talked to a Multnomah County prosecutor who works on human trafficking, and he said the hardest part of his job is getting victims or survivors to participate in prosecutions. It seems like that’s an issue for you as well.
Sgt. Alie: Honestly, we don’t see a lot of prosecutions because most of these are overseas. But yes, getting people to understand what happened and get themselves separated from it is really difficult.
Miller: Well, you say you don’t do a lot of prosecutions. So what does happen if you become alerted to this?
Sgt. Alie: Our goal most of the time is to try and recover any money that we can for that victim, but mostly to alert them to what is happening to them so they don’t lose any more money.
Miller: Just to stop the bleeding as opposed to, it’s a bad metaphor, but replace the blood.
Sgt. Alie: Yes, and recovering money is rare. Sometimes we’ve been really lucky when we’ve gotten a considerable amount of money back for people. Usually, because the money moves so quickly, the money that we recover doesn’t belong to the Vancouver area victim. It’s somebody downriver from them. And yeah, most of these things lead offshore. Every now and then we’ll find a money mule, money launderer that’s in the United States, who is actively and knowingly participating, and we try to pursue those, either through federal prosecution or to get our own state prosecutors to bring them back. But it’s pretty rare.
Miller: My understanding is that in recent years, these scammers have been using cryptocurrency or getting their victims to give them money through crypto. How does that work, especially if we’re talking about somebody who has never been a crypto investor or a crypto buyer in the past?
Sgt. Alie: Yeah, I noticed in your news report you just were talking about the owner of Binance who was convicted of money laundering.
Miller: Yeah.
Sgt. Alie: So most of these are generated from professional criminal organizations overseas. They want their money in cryptocurrency. It’s easiest to get it out of the country, they can get it out quickly. It avoids all the other bank reporting, bank secrecy act reporting requirements.
So what they will usually do, when they get somebody who’s starting to move amounts that are larger than you can buy in gift cards – anything over $1,000 really – they will try and talk that person into going down to the local 7-Eleven or gas station where there is a crypto ATM, and give them a crypto wallet address, teach them, while they’re on the phone at the machine, how to do it, and have them put that money into that machine and and send it off.
Miller: And is there a limit to how much money they can put in a machine at 7-Eleven?
Sgt. Alie: Some machines have limits. We have a case where an officer walked in just to get a soda one day and there was a woman putting $40,000 in cash in the machine. He interrupted her about $15,000 cash in and had to explain to her what was happening. But yeah, I believe it’s Spokane, somewhere on the east side of the state, I believe that they have outlawed those machines. They’re not gonna allow stores to have them. They decided that 90% of the transactions that go through those machines are due to scams.
Miller: You’re talking about mules here, money down river, overseas – how tangled is the flow of money?
Sgt. Alie: Extremely. So most of these victims are over 60 years old, people with not a whole lot of technological experience, people who are new to crypto. Not always. I mean, anybody is susceptible to these scams. So not all those people are willing to do it, willing to do the crypto transaction. They’ll send the money, but they won’t do crypto. Because the scammer wants it in crypto, they have other people around the country who are willing to send it in crypto, so they will direct victims to send money to those people, usually within the scam story. For example, they’ll say, “Hey, I’m working on this oil rig. My secretary lives in Kansas, send the money to her and I’ll have her send it to me.” The woman in Kansas is also being scammed with some other story. She believes she’s doing her lover a favor by receiving this money and sending it to them.
That’s what’s called a money mule, that person in Kansas. Each of those people was receiving money from multiple people. And each of those people sending money to the person in Kansas is usually directing money to multiple people like her. So you have these hubs that have other hubs. And yeah, it’s not uncommon to go 30, 40 people down from a victim and one victim in Vancouver.
Miller: What advice do you have for people?
Sgt. Alie: These types of scams are really hard to avoid. They are specifically created to pull on human needs, that if they find you at the right time of life, you wouldn’t recognize it. I like to kind of compare it to watching a magic show. If you’re sitting in the crowd, if you’re the target audience of this magic show, you see what’s happening and you see things disappear. You don’t know how it happened. If you were in the wings, objectively watching this, you might see how the process works. But for the person in the audience, it’s not real clear. So when I talk to people, and especially people who’ve been victims, they’re like this will never happen again. I would bet 90% of the time it happens again.
Miller: Wait, 90% of people who were victims in the past are revictimized by another version of a romance scam?
Sgt. Alie: Yes.
Miller: In other words, from your experience … I was gonna say the word gullible, that seems like a kind of victim-blaming word. But there’s something accepting or an openness to these scams that if you were taken in once, there’s a very good chance you’ll be taken in again?
Sgt. Alie: Yes.
Miller: How do you explain that?
Sgt. Alie: Well, I usually tell people you are the same person tomorrow that you were yesterday, with the same needs, your same life situation, right? In most cases, what they’re looking for is someone who lives an isolated lifestyle: divorced, widowed, single, maybe you have a really busy job. So you don’t have a whole lot of time for social life. Somebody who is religious, they love people that are religious. I think it’s because – and people who are religious may not like this description – people who are religious are willing to believe in something with limited evidence, hard evidence, which is fantastic. A lot of the features that they look for are things that you would look for in a friend.
Miller: And a lot of these, all these different characteristics are things that you could learn if you’re a sophisticated scammer, just by reading people’s posts online? I mean, a lot of this is publicly presented and then you can find … or am I even overthinking this? If the scammers send out a trillion phishing attempts, they don’t need to actually profile someone. They’ll just see who bites.
Sgt. Alie: In one sense, yeah, they just put chum in the water and wait to see what fish come up. They do target dating websites – SilverSingles is one that people talk about a lot. If you’re on a support site on Facebook for widows, things like that where people who have these features in their life might go. But people are targeted because they’re fans of certain bands, fans of certain artists.
For the person who is the victim, it would be hard to give them advice, that they would go, “oh, this is happening to me, I recognize it.” Because even when I talk to people and explain to them what’s happening to them, they have a hard time seeing it. I’ve come to the conclusion that I really just want people to know, don’t give away your money without looking into these things. If there’s somebody that you’re talking to and you’ve never met them face to face, don’t give them your money.
Miller: Has doing this work affected the way you think about human relationships and cries for help? I mean, it’s one thing to say – which seems like, I don’t mean to say this in an unfair way, very obvious advice – “don’t give tons of your money to people you’ve never met and don’t really know.” That seems obvious, but I’m wondering if in a deeper way, being a police officer, being exposed day after day to very, very intimate crimes, financial crimes, but still preying on people’s emotions, if it has affected the way you think about human relationships?
Sgt. Alie: My background is in psychology and mental health, which I think has helped me to see how people fall for this. It is intriguing to talk to these people and see how deeply invested they are in a relationship that is so clearly false. In today’s age, especially with social media, it is extremely easy to get to a point where your contact with the outside world is through your computer, instead of interpersonal relationships. And some people prefer that, especially maybe you don’t see yourself as super attractive. You’re not getting a whole lot of attention elsewhere and suddenly you have somebody online who’s an attractive person with a job, where they make tons of money, and they’re saying, “Hey, I love you, you’re beautiful.” Every morning, they’re sending you a text saying, “Hey, how are you doing? How was your meal last night?” That kind of attention can really be an attractive pull.
Miller: Sgt. Jay Alie, thanks very much.
Sgt. Alie: You bet. Thank you.
Miller: Jay Alie is in the Vancouver Police Department. He runs the VPD’s Property Crimes Unit.
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