US women found love online. The scam cost them ‘everything’

Reports of romance fraud to the Federal Trade Commission have been going up for years, tripling from 2016 to 2020, to more than 33,000 victims. — Dreamstime/TNS

TAMPA: Evelyn was smitten when she met a “silver fox” named Robert Wilson on Match.com. He was 62, with a largish nose, but fit, cosmopolitan and an engineer. She’d later come to believe he had millions in the bank.

She was 63 and had recently retired in Largo, Florida, after a career traveling the US as a project manager for Microsoft. Her marriage ended in divorce years earlier. Wilson’s wife had died, and he’d just wrapped up a civil infrastructure project in Cape Coral. They learned they shared values, like loyalty, through talking daily by text and phone.