Audio Transcript

Mollie Halpern: Romance scams, also known as confidence scams, result in the highest amount of financial losses when compared to other Internet-facilitated crimes.

Donna Gregory: The average complainant loses over a hundred thousand dollars.

Halpern: That was Donna Gregory of the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, which saw more than $82 million in victim losses in the last six months of 2014. Females suffered 82 percent of the losses; males sustained the remaining 18 percent. Both the amount of losses and number of complaints of the crime considerably increased over recent years, despite being classified differently. Anyone is susceptible to this emotional-based crime…

Gregory: A lot of them promise love, romance, to entice their victims online, but predators, they’re trolling the Internet, looking for victims.

Halpern: Romance scammers use social media—not just dating websites—to prey on their victims. Report romance scams at www.ic3.gov. I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau with FBI, This Week.