Team of Women Takes Down Serial Romance Scammer, Part 1
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 980 Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2023
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After her divorce, Linda decides to take a chance on online dating. She’s pleasantly surprised to make an instant connection with a man named Rich. He’s handsome, charismatic and has an impressive résumé — a Navy reservist working on his PhD. The relationship progresses quickly, with Linda and her young son moving into Rich’s new house. One day Linda receives a troubling message from a woman name Missi who claims to also be dating Rich. Linda discovers that he’s been lying to them both. His real name is Derek Alldred and he has a criminal record a mile long, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from numerous women. Linda and Missi decide they have to do something to keep this serial romance scammer from finding his next target.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on the perfect scam. |
| 0:03.0 | If you had to come up with a number, |
| 0:05.0 | I mean, if you try to even hazard to guess how many women he did this to? |
| 0:08.0 | At least 400. |
| 0:10.0 | He was a doctor, the lawyer, the Navy SEAL, an investment banker, a firefighter. |
| 0:17.0 | Welcome back to the perfect scam. |
| 0:22.0 | I'm your host Bob Sullivan. |
| 0:24.6 | More than $1.3 billion. That's how much the Federal Trade Commission says |
| 0:31.1 | romance scam victims reported stolen just in 2022. |
| 0:36.2 | According to the FBI, reported annual romance scam losses are triple what they were |
| 0:41.6 | just five years ago. And that's just what's reported. |
| 0:46.5 | Romance scams rob victims of money, but often so much more is taken. |
| 0:51.8 | Faith, love, trust. The trail of heartache left behind by the criminals is hard to describe. |
| 0:59.0 | We've heard a lot of romance scam stories here at the perfect scam but today's story well it's remarkable |
| 1:06.0 | in its scale and in the trail of tears left behind by the perpetrator a perpetrator who |
| 1:12.4 | probably would still be out there breaking hearts and emptying bank accounts if it weren't for a band of women who got together and said, enough. |
| 1:21.0 | Today's story is about how far a determined liar will go to get what they want, |
| 1:26.0 | and how, when victims speak out, the truth eventually wins out. |
| 1:31.0 | I was in the middle of a messy divorce. I was the |
| 1:34.8 | engineering manager at a nuclear power plant in Minnesota. So I had a great career, |
| 1:39.0 | messy divorce, six-year-old son who needed a lot of my attention and at a friend's recommendation |
| 1:45.6 | got on a website called it was for for older people looking for relationships |
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