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.
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