Connecticut woman empties her 401(k) in romance scam — here are the red flags she missed and how to protect yourself

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The hunt for emotion shouldn’t outgo you your beingness savings — but for a increasing fig of Americans, it has. That’s what happened to Jackie Crenshaw, from Connecticut.

She told ABC7 Eyewitness News that portion she had a large vocation and galore friends, astatine 60, she wanted idiosyncratic to stock her beingness with (1). So she tried online dating for the archetypal time, utilizing the website BLK.

Crenshaw met idiosyncratic who said they were a widower with 2 kids.

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However, things soon turned from romanticist to financial. Crenshaw told ABC7 that aft astir 2 months, the speech turned to investing successful cryptocurrency.

At first, she sent $40,000, and she received screenshots from the scammer that purported to amusement however good her investments were doing. This encouraged her to nonstop much and more.

In the end, she sent astir $1 million, and her 401(k) was wiped out.

She’s not alone. In 2024, Americans reported romance and assurance scams outgo them much than $670 million, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report (2).

While radical aged 60 and implicit reported the highest combined full losses (more than $389 million), radical from each property groups are affected by these types of scams.

Here’s however these scams typically unfold and the informing signs that could prevention you from becoming the adjacent victim.

Romance scams typically travel a predictable script. Scammers make an appealing persona, rapidly physique affectional intimacy, isolate their people and past present a fiscal “emergency” oregon concern opportunity.

Here are immoderate of the tactics to beryllium alert of.

Love bombing is simply a word made fashionable by Gen Zers, but it is simply a precise existent manipulation maneuver that can, astatine times, scope the level of affectional abuse.

According to the Fairfax County Department of Family Services, it involves “excessive attention, affection, compliments, declarations of love, and gifts to make an aggravated affectional enslaved and a consciousness of urgency and dependence, which past paves the mode for manipulation erstwhile the spouse is ‘hooked’ (3).”