Bank Kept Loaning Money to Victim of Online Love Scams ; At Least $100K Lost Since Aug 2020

Scammers love to prey on the vulnerable, and not just the gullible.

And once you’re marked as one, rest assured that they will keep coming after you with various different tactics just to get you to send them more money.

It has happened to many people before – a close relative of mine included – and it’ll continue to happen until the end of time.

What’s surprising, however, is the fact that the bank that is lending money to a scam victim continued to do so despite being informed by the victim’s close family members.

Don’t banks have an SOP in place to process such incidences, especially considering that scams, particularly online ones, are a dime a dozen nowadays?

How online scammers work

As told by Stomper M, his parents are in a middle of a divorce.

Likely heartbroken over the divorce, this made her 59-year-old mother a prime target for love scammers.

Although this isn’t the only platform they operate on, love scammers often reach out to their targets via Facebook first, before moving on to more “personal chats” on Whatsapp or WeChat.

It is on Facebook where M’s mother met her first love scammer.

“The very first time was a love scam where the scammer professed his love for her. He then said he was doing business and had lost a lot of money, He said he needed to borrow money from her and promised that he would pay her back an X-number of folds.”

“He sent her some photos of himself and his company. But we used Google reverse image search and managed to find all those pictures online.”

“When we showed my mother, she confronted the scammer. However, he said that it was someone who looked like him and she accepted his explanation.”

As someone on “the outside looking in”, it’s obvious that M’s mother has been thoroughly hoodwinked, but for her, the state of denial she’s in prevented her from seeing the obvious truth that everyone else around her is seeing.

This is just how scammers work.

Of course, once they have a groomed victim in their grasp, know that the scammers will use whatever charade they have and keep coming back for more money.

After losing S$32,500 to the first con, M’s mother fell for another love scam which cost her another S$14,000.

Once love scams stopped working, the scammers (probably from the same gang of conmen) started to switch up their tactics and posed as an FBI agent who, for some reason, decided to help M’s mother to recover the money she has lost.

As scams go, the so-called FBI agent ends up asking for S$30,000 for “file preparation” since he said he’s not going to “charge her any fees”.

According to the scammer, he wanted M’s mother to pay him S$30,000 within three days for the “FBI to conduct international investigations” and that she will get her lost money back in another three working days.

When she said she doesn’t have the money to pay him, he guilt-tripped her into borrowing even more money by saying, “You have yourself to blame, you borrowed a huge amount of money to pay a scammer but for you to get back your money you prove stubborn.”

She ended up losing S$30,000 to this fake FBI agent.

The banks ain’t helping either

M’s mother has drained all her savings to the prior love scams and had to resort to borrowing money from the bank.

However, despite all their efforts, they were stonewalled again and again.

In a series of screen-captured Whatsapp messages that M supposedly sent to a bank officer, he informed the person on the other end that his mother is a victim of an online scam and asked that her loan be cancelled.

Naturally, the officer is suspicious of the message, and M’s claims that he’s “her son”, and decided to report the issue to his superior.

That said, this probably isn’t the best way to get a bank to cancel a loan to a loved one who’s being scammed.

There are steps to take, and if you or someone you know is a victim of a scam, this article might be helpful. This article may also be helpful if you’re looking to help a family member who has fallen prey to a scam.

Learn more about various types of scams and how to avoid getting scammed here.

Featured Image: Free_styler/ Shutterstock.com