"She eventually lost her home in an electrical fire after she was unable to scrape together the money to get a handy man in to fix her air conditioner. Kleinert, then in her late 60s, tried to extinguish the flames but she eventually had to flee the house in fear for her life. Her home burned to the ground. None of her dogs made it out in time."
"He and Hyland had bonded over their separate emotional journeys and had planned to meet around the holidays where Hyland lived in Michigan. In a bind, Richard-who claimed to be a French national working as a construction contractor in Qatar-shared the username and password to his bank login and when Hyland pulled up his information on her laptop, his balance showed he had about $700,000 in cash parked in the account."
Romance and confidence scams exploit emotional connections to persuade victims to send money or share financial access. A Pennsylvania widow sent $100 gift card to help a girl's period need and was subsequently manipulated into losing her life savings, later unable to afford repairs, leading to a fatal house fire that killed her hospice dogs. In Michigan, a woman helped a man log into his bank account and saw $700,000; he instructed transfers to pay legal and translation fees while claiming a $10 million overseas contract, after which access to the account was lost. Scammers use empathy and false urgency to extract funds.
Read at Fortune
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