Romance Scams: Why Smart People Still Fall for Them

I’ve spent twenty-five years in IT, watching people make the same mistakes over and over. Not because they’re stupid. Because they’re human. The latest story making rounds—a woman named Jean Booth losing money to someone pretending to be a widowed man named Donnie—isn’t unusual. It’s depressingly common. And it tells us something important about why technical expertise means almost nothing when emotions are involved.

The Setup Is Always the Same

Romance scams follow a playbook so predictable you could set your watch by it. Someone creates a fake profile—usually stealing photos from social media or modeling sites. They pick a persona designed to tug at heartstrings: a widower, a military officer, someone with a tragic backstory but a good heart. Then they find someone lonely enough, kind enough, or just unlucky enough to believe in them.

The scammer invests time. Real time. Weeks or months of messages, conversations, building trust. This isn’t some automated bot farm operation, though those exist too. This is someone sitting down and crafting personalized lies, remembering details about your day, asking follow-up questions. It’s work. And it works because humans evolved to trust people who pay attention to us.

Then comes the ask. The story changes slightly. There’s an emergency. A medical bill. A business opportunity that needs funding. Plane tickets they can’t afford. Always something that makes sense, something that wouldn’t be needed if life were fair. And by that point, you’ve already decided this person is real. So you help.

Why Your Skepticism Doesn’t Matter

Here’s what infuriates me: I could show you the red flags. The generic profile photos. The typing patterns that don’t match a native English speaker. The excuses for why they can’t video call. The way they suddenly need money right as the relationship gets serious. Any of us could point at this situation and say “Obviously a scam.”

But that assumes we’re operating with our rational brain. We’re not. Not when someone has spent months telling us we’re special, that they’ve never felt this way before, that we understand each other like nobody else ever could. The loneliness that made someone vulnerable to the scam in the first place is the same force that overrides every warning sign.

I’ve seen brilliant engineers, accountants, nurses—people whose jobs require serious critical thinking—fall for this. Not because they lack intelligence. Because loneliness and hope don’t respond to logic. You can’t think your way out of wanting to believe in something good.

And that’s what the scammers understand better than anyone: the gap between knowing something intellectually and feeling it emotionally is where they operate.

What Actually Protects People

The standard advice is useless: “Don’t send money to people you haven’t met.” “Check their photos with reverse image search.” “Watch out for grammar mistakes.” Sure, do those things. But they’re like telling someone to just stop being lonely. The problem is deeper.

What might actually help:

• Video calls early and often. Real scammers will avoid this or make excuses. Genuine people want to see your face.
• Never, ever send money. Not even once. Not for any reason. The moment you do, you’ve proven you’ll do it again.
• Talk to someone you trust in your actual life. Not online. In person. Tell them about this person. Let them ask hard questions.
• Be suspicious of any relationship that only exists online. Not online-first, but exclusively online, forever.
• Remember that if something feels too good to be true—if this person seems perfect, if the timing is perfect, if they’re falling for you at perfect speed—your instinct is probably right.

The Harder Truth

The real issue isn’t that scammers are getting better. They’re not. They’re just taking advantage of something that’s expanded massively: the ability to meet people entirely through screens. That’s created a new kind of loneliness. You can be in a room full of people and still feel completely alone. Online dating—legitimate or otherwise—preys on that.

Jean Booth’s story isn’t about her being gullible. It’s about a scammer understanding human psychology better than most therapists, and having the patience to exploit it. The two of them lived in completely different worlds with completely different goals, and he won because he was willing to lie for months.

The best protection? Honestly? Building a life where loneliness isn’t the primary emotion. Getting involved in communities. Spending time with actual humans. It sounds simple because it is. It’s just harder than scrolling through dating apps.

If you’re online and you meet someone, that person should be willing to prove they’re real. Not through messages. Through video. Through eventually meeting in the actual physical world. If they won’t, they’re not who they claim to be. Full stop.

Source: Woman falls victim to romance scam after sending money to a fake boyfriend: ‘I w…