The $2 Million Romance Scam
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2019
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New Yorker Jerry Needleman was married for over 40 years when his wife passed away in 2008. The devoted couple never had children, and now in his 80s, Jerry settled into a quiet life alone as a widower. Meanwhile in Florida, a woman named Sylvia is pursuing a relationship with a retiree. The man has spent thousands of dollars on his much-younger girlfriend. When they become engaged, the man's son steps in. In 2012, the family successfully sues Sylvia for fraud. One year later, Jerry is out for his daily walk when he comes across a distraught woman crying on a park bench. The woman is Sylvia. Jerry stops to see if she is OK, unknowingly embarking on what will be a four-year ordeal that includes a marriage, a divorce, a second marriage and annulment — and nearly $2 million lost to a romance scam.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on AARP's The Perfect Scam. |
| 0:05.0 | She pretended to love me. |
| 0:07.0 | The whole purpose is to get my money. |
| 0:09.0 | My judgment was terrible, but judgment is not criminal what he did was criminal |
| 0:17.5 | Welcome back to AARP's The Perfect Scam I'm your host Julie Getts And for those of you who are joining us for the first time, |
| 0:25.6 | I'd like to introduce my co-host Frank Abagnale. Frank, thanks for being here. |
| 0:29.7 | Hi Julie, great to be with you today. Frank, our topic this week is sweetheart scams. We've talked about them before, but |
| 0:36.7 | there always seems to be another story of someone who falls victim to one. Now one thing |
| 0:41.2 | we've learned while doing this show is that this type of scam really |
| 0:44.4 | resonates with our listeners. Whether it's because they themselves have been |
| 0:48.1 | victimized or a family member or someone they work with that went looking for |
| 0:52.2 | romance hoping to be swept off |
| 0:54.0 | their feet but instead found themselves wrapped in a scam. Earlier this year the |
| 0:59.6 | FTC reported that romance scams ranked number one on total reported losses. |
| 1:05.0 | And just to unpack that a little bit further, the number of romance scams reports more |
| 1:09.9 | than doubled and reported losses increased more than fourfold from 2015 to 2018. |
| 1:17.0 | Frank, why is this scam such a lucrative business? |
| 1:20.0 | Well, first of all, I think it's easy for people to find some people that are lonely and they're |
| 1:25.1 | looking for companionship and they're very easy to get to know those people on the internet, |
| 1:30.8 | over the telephone. |
| 1:32.8 | And these type of romance scams work for a long, long time. |
| 1:37.4 | People say, well, you know, before I ever sent any money, I was talking on the phone and visiting all the time almost nightly and |
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