Mary is a 72-year-old widow who retired years ago as a bookkeeper for a Miami-based corporation and moved to Gainesville, where her daughter lives. Romance certainly wasn’t on her agenda, but a scammer using the name of “Bill” thought differently.

Bill found Mary, not on a dating site, as one might expect, but by seeing her profile on LinkedIn. He connected the dots and thought Mary might be a perfect target—a lonely widow not well-versed in technology.

Unfortunately, he was right. By the time Bill got through with Mary, he had scammed her out of $90,000.

“I wanted to share this story because these scammers prey on lonely elderly women,” said Mary’s daughter, Lisa Patino, a schoolteacher. “They groom them. He told her not to tell your family. If they ask, don’t say anything.”

Bill told Mary they were committed to each other.

“He told her they were like husband and wife,” Lisa said. “And she believed everything. It’s just very sad.”

Mary never met Bill. She is just one of many older people who have been scammed under the guise of romance.

Nationwide, the number of people targeted by sweetheart scammers is skyrocketing. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported 853,935 cases of imposter scams in 2023, with losses totaling $2.7 billion. Romance scams generally fall under the imposter category because the perpetrator uses a false identity.

“Digital tools are making it easier than ever to target hard-working Americans, and we see the effects of that in the data,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a February news release. “The FTC is working hard to take action against those scams.”

Grandparent scams are also a favorite of imposters. They target older people by playing on their concerns about grandchildren who have allegedly gotten into a jam.

Last year, Gainesville resident Alfred W. Dorsett, 78, got a call from someone who said he was a lawyer in the company of a young woman who said she was Dorsett’s grandniece.

It turned out that the young woman had allegedly been involved in a traffic accident and was facing jail unless Dorsett could come up with bond money. He did, but it was all very strange and mysterious—and as it turned out, also a scam.

“In retrospect, it was like a Broadway production,” Dorsett said. “He suggested I go to the bank. They asked for $10,000, but I said I could access $5,000 right now. He told me to put it into an envelope. He gave me his name and his address. I called back, and he answered.”

Dorsett said a woman purporting to be his niece called back, crying. It turned out she was an actress playing a role in the scam. Dorsett said the male caller told him he would send an Uber to pick up the money, and the scammer did just that.

“They got $5,000 in cash from me,” he said. “They gave information from what sounded like a real police report. They convinced me and I’m intelligent. But they took me right down that rabbit hole.”

Dorsett did file a report with local authorities, but neither they nor he expected him to get his money back. He has not.

In Mary’s case, her suitor said he was an oil company engineer.

“I told her to be careful when talking to people she met online,” daughter Lisa said. “You don’t know who they are.”

But Mary was convinced that “Bill” was on the up and up. He sent her pictures of himself from his travels.

Soon, Bill was telling Mary that he would be coming to Gainesville to see her, that he wanted to marry her, and that he had bought her a ring. His only problem was a financial snafu he had with the government of China, which had frozen his assets.            

Lisa went onto a social catfishing website to verify if “Bill” really was who he said he was. He was not. Lisa found his pictures online, but it was another man named Bill, a Georgia dentist. Lisa found that the imposter “Bill had simply borrowed the real Bill’s images.”

The daughter insisted, but her mom resisted breaking things off with Bill until finally, Lisa took her to the Alachua County’s Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) to share her concerns. That’s when Mary broke down and admitted she had made three payments to Bill, totaling $90,000.

“That hurt her,” Patino said. “She’ll be fine because we’ll take care of her, but that was her nest egg. She lives on social security. But she still thinks this guy was for real and that he must have had a heart attack.”

ACSO spokesman Art Forgey said there’s often not much investigators can do.

“I know the detective assigned to this case, and he traced the server back to a Lithuanian business with a secondary server in Phoenix, Arizona,” he said. “When you get folks scamming from another country, we don’t get much cooperation from organizations outside the United States.”

Forgey said the sheriff’s office gets information about a few cases involving older people, but he believes they are underreported.

“You get somebody who is elderly and doesn’t have many contacts outside of what they do online, and the friendship and romance grow quickly,” he said. “[Older people] are from a very trusting generation, and people’s words mean something.”

Gainesville-based elder law attorney Shannon Miller agrees these are underreported crimes—and with good reason.

“It’s so humiliating,” Miller said. “They don’t know what to do. They don’t have any money. Their families have alienated them because they told them this was a scam, and they didn’t listen. And it just kills them. They [can] literally die from a broken heart in these cases.”

One might think that banks, with their sophisticated algorithms and tactics for managing money, would know when the customer was initiating a transaction that was not in keeping with their usual practices and stop it. But that is rarely the case.

Miller said Senate Bill 556, or the Protection of Specified Adults act, may help. The Florida House and Senate passed the legislation unanimously and it now awaits the governor’s signature.

“It creates liability protection for banks conducting asset freezes when they act in good faith,” she said. Under the legislation, banks can freeze assets for up to 30 days, giving the legal system time to act.

Miller said the legal community hopes to next year push through legislation they plan to call Service on Unidentifiable Exploiters.

“Right now, the problem is we can’t serve these people because we don’t know their name,” Miller said. “We would serve the scammer through the dating app communication tool through messaging.”

In other words, hit the scammers on their own turf.

“We hope to serve these scammers in the same way they communicate with our victims,” Miller said. “Even though we don’t know the scammer’s name, that could be sufficient to stop payments from going out of the account.”

In the private sector, nonprofit organizations like Elder Options—which has itself been the target of scammers—work to educate seniors about how to avoid scams. Its website includes pages detailing, for example, how to spot gift card scams and contractor fraud.

One company already trying to make it more difficult for scammers is Carefull, a San Francisco-based financial protection service for financial caregivers, adults over 55, and adult offspring who may help their parents manage their money.

“Carefull currently detects and alerts users to several types of transactions that can be signs that someone has been targeted by a romance scammer, including wire transfers, cryptocurrency purchases, peer-to-peer payment app transfers, transfers to unfamiliar accounts, and withdrawals from investment accounts,” said Cameron Huddleston, director of education and outreach.

Soon, the company plans to launch an alert specific to romance scams.

“This alert will flag sign-ups for dating sites and monitor suspicious transactions following the sign-ups,” Huddleston said.

Romance scams are so concerning to Regina Bradley, wife of pastor Don Bradley at Grove Park Community Christian Church near Hawthorne, that she decided to be proactive. She asked Judy Harden of Seniors vs. Crimes to give a talk on the issue to seniors at their church earlier this year.

Seniors vs. Crime is a program of the Florida Attorney General’s Office, and Harden is the deputy regional director for region 4, which encompasses 15 North Central Florida counties, including Alachua.

Harden says that victims unknowingly bring their troubles on themselves. She begins her talks by asking people to survey their social media output. “How many people have more than 200 friends on Facebook? Can you name 10 or 20 of them?”

Harden reminds her audience that scammers can see what you have posted, where you have been, and what your likes and dislikes are.

“They know all this because you have posted it on social media,” Harden said. “They know your kids’ names, your grandchildren’s names, and what activities they are in because you have posted this on social media. We put it out there.”

In other words, be careful about what you say about yourself on social media. It lets some of the wrong people get to know all about you and makes you a target. Your new “friend” on social media may not be your friend at all.

Editor’s note: This story was independently reported by Ronnie Lovler and underwritten by Elder Options. It was also published with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations, and the Silver Century Foundation.