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Kate Kleinert of Glenolden had been widowed for 12 years and had stopped looking for love when she received a Facebook friend request in August 2020, she wrote to a US Senate committee last year.
The man said he was a doctor named Tony Richard, and quickly struck up a friendship with Kate based on mutual interests, she said.
"We started talking on the phone through an app he had me download," Kate told Senators. "He told me he was a surgeon working in Iraq through a contract with the United Nations and that he has two children, a little boy and a girl."
Soon, the relationship became romantic, and it wasn't long before "Tony" and the "kids" began asking Kate for money, she says. At first, the amounts were small and needed for "emergencies," but things quickly spiraled.
"I was constantly sending him gift cards, even though now I was using up the last of my husband’s life insurance," Kate testified. "My savings were gone. I was living on my credit cards and he was getting what I took from Social Security and my pension."
Most heartbreakingly, no one seemed to notice her plight.
"And all this time, only one person, an employee at a drug store, ever asked me if I knew who I was sending these gift cards to," Kate said.
But she believed "Tony's" promise to pay her back in full, and when he said he was going to be allowed to visit her in Philadelphia, Kate was beside herself.
"I was so excited," she wrote. "I got all dressed up, my hair was done, and my nails were done. I waited all night long."
But "Tony" never called. Kate finally began to suspect something was amiss the next day when a man claiming to be his lawyer called her and asked for $20,000 in bail money.
"Tony," he said, had been arrested at the border after police found drugs in his bag.
"The lawyer told me to do whatever I could [to get the bail money] — put a mortgage on my house, borrow it from someone in my family," Kate said. "I couldn’t do it."
With a little investigating, the ruse fell apart. "Tony's" pictures, it turned out, were that of a Spanish doctor and were commonly used online by spam accounts.
In all, Kate said she lost nearly $40,000 to the scammers, who have yet to be identified or charged.
"By now, I had sent him a total of $39,000, which to some people is not much but for someone in my position it’s a great deal," she told the committee. "I am still paying for that today because I can’t get things repaired at the house."
She's also had to grieve the end of what she believed was a genuine relationship.
"The loss that hurts the most was losing his love and losing the family I thought I was going to have and what my new future was going to be," Kate wrote. "That is much harder to deal with than losing the money."
But now, she's getting by with the support of her sisters, and with the help of the AARP, Kate is speaking out to keep other seniors from falling victim to heartless online scammers.
"Even though this experience is painful to speak about, I want to be an ambassador for this experience because it’s so devastating and many people have been through this but not spoken about it," she wrote.
"They continue to carry this weight around. But in my case, I got pulled in because I had forgotten how good it felt to be loved."
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