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This sounds to me like a relationship long con. A lot of people are isolated and lonely, not just the elderly. The scammer tries to create a spontaneous meet t

This sounds to me like a relationship long con. A lot of people are isolated and lonely, not just the elderly. The scammer tries to create a spontaneous meet that seems genuine. If you engage then it’s about quickly developing a relationship and then if that works, asking for money. I wonder how much of this can be automated these days. This sort of scam usually requires a lot of effort and is more targeted. Since many are claiming ti be targeted now it could be a sign that scammers have been able to automate it with some basic scripts or even AI so it can scale.

al_borland 4y ago
Yep, that's pretty much what the article says. They take several weeks before getting to the scam. Someone messaged me on Reddit a while back pretty randomly after a comment I made mentioned it would be my birthday at some point in the year. It seemed a little too weird, she said we lived 30 minutes from each other. I didn't know if it was a girl or a guy for quite a long time, so there was no relationship talk. We both wrote really long detailed replies, much more than any script would be able to handle. Ended up meeting up with her and it was in fact a real person, but I was very up front with my skepticism very early on in the chat. Even after we met up I said something about how I was half expecting my car to be broken into or something. She ghosted me afterward, lol. Maybe it was a relationship long con, but I didn't look like I was worth conning or I was still too on edge and not engaging enough to make it worth the time she'd have to put in to make me not think she was scamming me. Or I'm just boring, ugly, and weird. Whatever, she basically just complained about work for an hour.