Guys wanting your email on a dating site

Over weeks or months you feel yourself growing closer. You make plans to meet in person, but for your new love something always comes up. Then you get an urgent request. There’s an emergency (a medical problem, perhaps, or a business crisis), and your online companion needs you to wire money quickly. He or she will promise to pay it back, but that will never happen. Instead, the scammer will keep asking for more until you finally realize you’ve been had.

Phony suitors also seek out targets on social media, and they are increasingly active. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received more than 25,000 reports about romance scams in 2019, a nearly threefold increase since 2015. Victims' losses totaled $201 million, almost 40 percent more than in 2018 and the most for any type of consumer fraud.

The older the victim, the heavier the financial toll, according to the FTC — the median individual loss for people aged 70 and over was $10,000, compared to $2,600 for all victims.