It is Valentine's Day weekend and love is in the air. More and more these days, that first spark

begins with connections we make on our phones and computers, but not all budding online romances

are real. Scammers use texts and fake profiles to win the trust of people looking for love

and fleece Americans of billions of dollars every year.

I recently spoke to investigative reporter Cesari Podcol, who is writing a book about these

scams to understand how they work and who they target.

In the process of doing my reporting on this, I've spoken to multiple victims who've lost over

a million dollars, many in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The losses are really staggering. Really, anyone, old, rich, poor young, this targets

people of all nationalities, all genders, educational backgrounds. Really, it's a universal scam

because of that psychological manipulation aspect. So I think all of us have to watch out for the red flags. They involve

things like someone being just really friendly coming out of nowhere and offering to teach you an

investment opportunity, sometimes being pushy and forcing you to do things that you don't feel

comfortable doing, like depositing more and more money into an investment opportunity that you

start to suspect. Maybe not what you think thought it was. So watching out for those things and really just anyone online contacting

you out of the blue offering things that you're not aware of and weren't expecting. Those are the

things we should all be watching out for. And if you are caught up in one of these scams, what are the

best ways that you have

to get your money back?

So first of all, if you are in the midst of this scam and you're still talking to someone,

the best thing you can do really is to ask someone, show them like, hey, I'm talking with

this person, do you think it's real?

Because if you're still doubting it, getting a second opinion from a trusted friend can really help you kind of realize, oh, wait, no, I am wrong. Then once you realize that you have

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