A woman overseas thought she was in a relationship with Brad Pitt and believed she was sending him around $1.5 million for cancer treatment.
Thousands of Kiwis have fallen victim to romance scams – swindled out of life savings after believing they were in a committed relationship online.
ANZ alone sees about three cases a week where customers suffered a financial loss from a romance or friendship scam. The average loss was $13,500, compared to $2500 for other types of fraud.
NCSC Threat and Incident Response team lead Tom Roberts told The Front Page they are severely underreported.
“People feel ashamed about it. They feel like they’re more vulnerable because they’ve potentially lost or exposed something, often involving sending intimate images.
“For us, over the last reporting period we saw about 28 dating and romance scams. We know that number is very low.
“We had 17 incidents over the last year that involved $100,000 or more. That was for [things like] unauthorised access, cryptocurrency scams, people being tricked when they’re buying property. We had one in the dating and romance scam category of over $100,000,” he said.
Roberts said these kinds of scams are usually a slow burn.
“You don’t actually realise that a lot of money is leaving your bank account. It could be $50 for a bill here, $20 for a bill there. Before you know it, you’re hooked and you’ve drained a lot of your bank account,” he said.
With the introduction of the internet, and now artificial intelligence (AI), more people are reporting more scammers using a celebrity’s likeness in their schemes.
Just this year, we heard how multiple women around the world poured money and emotions into a romance scam using the image of former Shortland Street star Martin Henderson. They lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and dedicated years to the fake relationships. One woman alone lost $375,000.
A woman overseas thought she was in a relationship with Brad Pitt and believed she was sending him around $1.5 million for cancer treatment.
Another case saw an Auckland man who met a Singaporean woman on the Tinder dating app. He was tricked into sending $569,000, believing he was investing in Bitcoin.
Dating apps have changed the game, Roberts said.
“It just makes it more easy for people to be fooled into fake relationships. The people who do them are often working in these sorts of scam farm-type areas where some of them are being held under slave-like conditions to extort money out of people through multiple different romance scams at once.
“There are some places where they go and think they’re going to work and they’ll get their passports and their identity documents held captive and then told that you can work them back for a certain amount of money. So often, the people that are doing the scamming are victims as well,” he said.
According to Netsafe reports in 2023, an average of over $18,000 per victim was lost to a romance or dating scam in New Zealand.
Listen to the full episode to hear how you can stay vigilant while dating online.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The 29-year-old had a further 14 months jail time added to his current sentence.