By the Time They Ask for Money, the Scam Has Already Worked
Dennis Jones was 82, divorced, a grandfather his family adored. He met a woman named Jessie on Facebook. They never met in person, but they talked for months, and he came to trust her. On a family vacation he told his son and daughter he was looking at a big cryptocurrency investment. Jessie had recommended it.
The investment was fake. So was Jessie. Jones put in his life savings, and she kept asking for more. He was financially ruined, and not long after, he took his own life. “There wasn’t enough money left even to pay for his headstone,” his daughter Laura said on the AARP podcast The Perfect Scam.
Most people picture this kind of scam wrong. They imagine the moment of the ask (the investment pitch, the request to wire money) and think, I’d never fall for that. Maybe not. But by the time the money comes up, the work is already done. The pitch isn’t the trap. The months of friendship before it are.
This is the scam that AARP calls financial grooming. You may have heard its blunter name: pig butchering, from a Chinese phrase, shā zhū pán, that means fattening the pig before slaughter. INTERPOL prefers “romance baiting.” Whatever you call it, the mechanism is the same, and understanding it is the only real defense, because it works by switching off the part of you that would otherwise say no.
How it actually starts
At the door, it usually looks like a wrong number.
A text arrives: “Hi David, are we still on for lunch?” You don’t know any David. You write back, “Sorry, wrong number.” A polite stranger apologizes. You chat for a moment. They seem nice. That small, accidental-feeling exchange is a tested opening line, designed to get a reply out of a careful person.
The first contact can also come through a dating app, a Facebook friend request, or a direct message on Instagram. The channel changes; the goal doesn’t. They want a conversation, and then they want time.
What follows is a long stretch of getting to know you, often weeks, sometimes months. They find the things you have in common. Lost a spouse? They lost one too. They text through the day, send photos, ask about your life. One woman told a fraud investigator she’d received 560 pictures from her scammer. None of it mentions money. That’s the point. They are, as former prosecutor Erin West puts it, “selling victims a dream”: an enticing mix of love and wealth, built patiently, before a single dollar is ever discussed.
Why careful people fall
The reason this works on smart, cautious adults has a name. Kathy Stokes, who directs fraud prevention for the AARP Fraud Watch Network, calls it getting a victim “under the ether” — a heightened emotional state where the brain stops filtering things logically and runs on feeling instead.
“A lot of people who have experienced fraud will say, ‘Looking back, I felt like I was in some kind of trance,’” Stokes says. That trance is the design working as intended, and being smart doesn’t switch it off. The relationship is the anesthetic; the investment is the surgery.
Only after that trust is built does the opportunity appear. They’ve made good money on a certain platform, they mention. Maybe you’d like to try? They start you small and low-risk. You see returns: real-looking numbers, polished statements, a website that behaves like a genuine brokerage. So you put in more. The returns climb. You put in more again.
Then you try to withdraw, and the trouble starts: a fee you didn’t expect, a tax you have to pay first, a delay, another fee. Eventually the money won’t come out at all, because there was never any money — just a screen designed to show you what you wanted to see. When your savings are drained, the person you trusted disappears.
The warning signs all come before the money
Because the scam depends on the relationship phase, the signs you can act on show up early, long before any investment is mentioned. Watch for these:
- A stranger who finds you out of the blue and keeps the conversation going. A wrong-number text, an unsolicited DM, a too-friendly new match. The U.S. Secret Service advises treating anyone who can “seemingly never meet in person” with suspicion.
- Fast affection. Pet names like “honey” and “my love” within days or weeks. It’s called love bombing, and real relationships don’t move at that speed.
- A push to move off the app. If a new friend quickly wants to switch to WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, that’s a red flag. Dating sites and social platforms watch for these scammers, so the criminals want a channel where no one is watching.
- “Don’t tell anyone.” If they discourage you from mentioning the investment to family, a friend, or a financial advisor, that secrecy is the scam protecting itself. A legitimate opportunity survives a second opinion.
- An investment tip from someone you’ve never met in person. Especially crypto, gold, or anything with returns that sound too good. The romance and the “opportunity” arriving from the same person is the whole pattern.
If you’re not sure, here’s what to do
You don’t have to diagnose the whole scheme. You just have to slow it down. A few simple moves break it:
- Talk to someone before you invest a cent. A financial advisor, your bank, or an adult child. Scammers tell you to keep it quiet precisely because an outside voice ends the spell.
- Run a reverse image search on their photos. Save a picture they sent, upload it to Google Images (click the camera icon), and see where else it appears. Scammers reuse the same faces across fake profiles: the “CEO” on one site is the “HR director” on another.
- Check the investment yourself. The SEC runs investor.gov for exactly this. Never put money into something you don’t fully understand, and be wary that the apps these scams use usually aren’t on the real Apple or Google app stores.
- Don’t trust a video call as proof. This used to be solid advice for confirming someone is real. It no longer is. In late 2024, police in Hong Kong broke up a grooming ring that used deepfake software to appear live on video.
- Report it, even if you’re embarrassed. File with the FBI at IC3.gov and call the free AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360. Reporting helps investigators, and sometimes money is recovered.
The scale, and the other victims
If you think this is a fringe problem, the numbers say otherwise. In 2024, Americans reported $5.8 billion lost to crypto investment fraud of this kind, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, a 47 percent jump in losses from the year before. People over 60 lost the most of any age group: about $2.8 billion in crypto-related crime, nearly double the year prior.
There’s a second set of victims you won’t see on your phone. Many of the people typing those affectionate messages aren’t free. The scam compounds run mostly out of Southeast Asia, where, according to the United Nations, more than 200,000 people in Myanmar and Cambodia have been forced to run online scams: lured by fake jobs, stripped of their passports, and held against their will. The “Jessie” on the other end may be a trafficked worker reading from a script, watched and punished if she doesn’t hit a quota.
None of that changes what you need to do. But it explains why this won’t simply stop, and why the responsibility to recognize it falls to you.
So keep the one idea that matters: the trap is the warm, patient, weeks-long friendship that makes the asking feel safe. Anyone who arrives in your life through a screen, moves fast toward affection, and eventually steers toward money, no matter how kind or convincing, has shown you the pattern. You can see it now. That’s the whole defense.