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Dena Temple Raston
From recorded future news and prx, this is click here. Ruth Grover lives in a seaside town in northern England called Hartlepool. These days she shares the house with a parakeet about the size of your hand. His name is Pinda.
Ruth Grover
I have a little parakeet and he never shuts up. As soon as I talked on my phone, he looks at me as if to say, oh, poor thing, look, she's talking to herself again. And he joins in. As soon as I go off this call, he will be perfectly quiet.
Dena Temple Raston
Ruth used to be a dispatcher for the Hartlepool Police Department. Her husband Jeff, he was a cob. About 15 years ago, the two of them decided to take early retirement. The plan was to visit their kids and spend long stretches of time in the Greek islands. And then Jeff was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2008.
Ruth Grover
Couple of years after that, I put widowed on my Facebook account.
Dena Temple Raston
That seven letter word widowed seemed to light up the Internet for Ruth.
Ruth Grover
I suddenly became very attractive. I suddenly became beautiful to four star generals in the US army, which I thought bit strange.
Dena Temple Raston
A lonely four star army general had started writing her Facebook messages, lots of them.
Ruth Grover
After three days he said to me, I've been looking to have someone for a wife to have a serious long term relationship and I'd like you to know that you're going to be that person.
Dena Temple Raston
Which was weird because Ruth actually wasn't looking for love. She didn't want to be that person. And remember what Ruth did for a living, she was a police dispatcher.
Ruth Grover
I worked on telephone and radio with police. So if somebody rang in, you had to find out as much information as you could before you passed it on because you couldn't dispatch anybody to a house where there was a burglary and they all had guns or anything like that, you know, so you've got to question, and I think, you know, if you don't understand something, question it. I think it was the wanting to marry me after three days that finally did it.
Dena Temple Raston
You are quite charming. I just, well, it took no time at all for Ruth to start googling and discover that her four star general, well, let's just say he wasn't a military man.
Ruth Grover
The four star general they used on me was actually a German folk singer, just his head photoshopped on somebody else's body.
Dena Temple Raston
And while this was almost funny in hindsight at the time, Ruth found the scam kind of insulting.
Ruth Grover
This person thought I was such a desperate widow that he could marry me in three days. And when I learned about it I was even more angry.
Dena Temple Raston
These scammers seemed to be getting away with all of this, and while Ruth saw through it, there was no one helping the people who didn't. So one night when Ruth was watching football on the telly, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
Ruth Grover
I was in a mood. I was actually watching football.
Dena Temple Raston
Soccer.
Ronnie Tokozowski
That's lovely. Football from Manchester United. Through the lines I know both Robbie and Tim in the studio were talking about Casemiro.
Ruth Grover
I was watching a team called Manchester United and I was watching them and I thought, we need a team. This has got to be a team effort.
Dena Temple Raston
So Ruth created a team and she called it, with apologies to her favorite football power scam haters, United Foreign I'm Dena Temple Raston and this is Click Here. We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. Today, a special Valentine's Day edition on how one woman took on the world of romance scammers and how the scams themselves have changed. They aren't just about stealing somebody's money anymore. Now they include fraud, identity theft and a new money laundering.
Ronnie Tokozowski
The people being emotionally convinced to go and wire their own money. But it's something where we see them wiring money to facilitate a lot of these other crimes that scammers are doing.
Dena Temple Raston
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Rebecca d'Antonio
Click here.
Dena Temple Raston
Romance scams have been around just about as long as there have been people looking for love. I got scammed big time and it hurts. It hurts financially and hurts emotionally.
Ronnie Tokozowski
A Westfield woman says it wasn't love. It was a perfect illusion.
Dena Temple Raston
All this happens on places like Facebook or Instagram or on dating sites like OkCupid. I saw your profile. You're so beautiful. Who could resist that? It leads to longer conversations, professions of love, and then inevitably a sob story of some sort. And the more Ruth looked into it, the more she thought a kind of Facebook support group like Scam Haters United could help people spot these scams early. And she was right.
Ruth Grover
And I was shocked at this. The almost immediate response that I got to it.
Dena Temple Raston
She was hearing from people all over the world.
Ruth Grover
We've got Claudia, the German dentist, as I call her. We've got a couple, you know, Jo, who does our Instagram page. She's in London. And, you know, we've got Greece, we've got Romania, you name it, we've got them.
Dena Temple Raston
And Valentine's Day, well, the run up to February 14, Ruth says this time of year is particularly bad.
Ruth Grover
Oh, it's Horrendous at the moment, Horrendous. Every single year we have it. Women going to and men going to airports, and then nobody arrives.
Dena Temple Raston
In the military version of this, the one they tried on Ruth, it's a soldier in a war zone unable to visit until they get leave, last minute leave gets canceled. Or maybe it's the young single dad who runs into some crisis. He so wanted to come see you, but hey, could you just provide a quick little loan?
Ruth Grover
People trust the Internet crazily. They trust social media, they trust everything that comes on their phone and they.
Dena Temple Raston
Shouldn'T, and we all know that. So when we get swindled, we're embarrassed, we feel stupid.
Ruth Grover
It's heartbreaking because, you know, they are so confused and by that time they're out of a lot of money. I sort of realized that people want somebody to talk to because they've got nobody else to talk to about this.
Dena Temple Raston
And as you might expect, it's not all that easy for someone to admit that the handsome man or beautiful woman who is saying all these nice things isn't who they say they are. And it's hard to hear someone like Ruth tell you so. But that's exactly what Scam Haters United is meant to do.
Ruth Grover
We can put enough doubt in their minds so that, you know, they go back to the scammer and they say, oh, you know, Ruth said that you're fake.
Dena Temple Raston
One of Ruth's strategies let pictures do the talking. She started collecting all the online photographs that scammers use to fool their victims, a kind of book of mugshots. And she'd ask people who think they might be the target of scams to see if the photo that was sent to them was in the album. Find your new friend's picture, then you know you were being scammed.
Ruth Grover
We've got albums of doctors, albums of soldiers, albums of non military. One of the most common things they pretend to be is an orthopedic surgeon in a war zone. So we've got an album about orthopaedic surgeons. Once you know what a fake account looks like on Facebook, you can see them immediately. But people often need to know, need somebody to tell them.
Dena Temple Raston
Rue said a lot of the time people came to scam haters too late. They'd already given the scammers too much information. So she not only helps people spot a scam while it's going on, but clean it up once it's happened.
Ruth Grover
We do a lot of damage limitation, like fraud alerts and sort out your Social Security number. And things like this.
Dena Temple Raston
Scammers apply for unemployment in the target's name. They steal identities. One woman Ruth talked to was a victim of a romance scam over a decade ago.
Ruth Grover
They were still using her details, so she was reliving that all over again.
Dena Temple Raston
Scam Haters United has put Ruth in an unlikely position of being a reality check for strangers.
Ruth Grover
So people would say, I'm talking to this one. Is it real? Is it fake? And so it was just a point of contact for a lot of people.
Dena Temple Raston
Consider what happened to Rebecca d'. Antonio.
Ruth Grover
Rebecca was a very special case. She came to us. She'd been in a very. She'd been in a long and very intense scan.
Dena Temple Raston
And the problem was, it didn't occur.
Rebecca d'Antonio
To me that I had been scammed.
Dena Temple Raston
This is Rebecca. A few years ago, she met someone online named Matthew.
Rebecca d'Antonio
I just, I thought he was really sexy looking.
Dena Temple Raston
He sent a great picture.
Rebecca d'Antonio
He looked like he was somewhere exotic. It looked like he was in like a, you know, a picture maybe was taken by a friend where they were sitting at a, at a table together, maybe at a restaurant. In the background there were like palm trees. He looked like he was on vacation. And. And I just remember, wow, he's so good looking.
Dena Temple Raston
They met on the dating site OkCupid.
Rebecca d'Antonio
But we moved off that really quickly because he was having trouble with the chat platform, so which I can understand. I was, I was not having the greatest time with it myself.
Dena Temple Raston
He said he was originally from Australia and had been adopted and brought to live in the United States at an early age. He lived in Maine. Rebecca, as it so happens, lived in Boston.
Rebecca d'Antonio
And I remember he, in his profile, he, he felt very self conscious a little bit about his accent. And I'm someone. I love accents. We connected on a lot of levels and had a lot of deep conversations. You know, it's all about building that connection. You go onto a dating site to find somebody to build a connection with. And, you know, a lot of people think that a scam starts when the request for money starts. It couldn't be more untrue. It actually begins from that first introduction. It builds itself very organically like any other relationship. And sometimes that's why it's really hard to tell, you know, what's truth versus fiction.
Dena Temple Raston
How much were you guys corresponding? A lot.
Rebecca d'Antonio
Probably more than was good for us.
Dena Temple Raston
And then you guys talked on the phone as well, right?
Rebecca d'Antonio
Yes, yes.
Dena Temple Raston
Did he have an Australian accent?
Rebecca d'Antonio
He did, he did. Although, you know, in retrospect, in retrospect.
Dena Temple Raston
She said she didn't know exactly what an Australian accent sounded like. She'd heard them in movies, of course.
Rebecca d'Antonio
But it's amazing what you'll explain away to yourself.
Dena Temple Raston
Eventually, they decided to meet in person.
Rebecca d'Antonio
He had a business trip, an international business trip he had to go on. So we decided, okay, well, after that business trip, he had a young son, and he was a single father. So he. We were all three of us going to get together and, like, spend the day together or something.
Dena Temple Raston
And then something went wrong with his credit card while he was on the trip.
Rebecca d'Antonio
And so I. I've traveled internationally before. I've had that happen where you can notify the bank five times, and still the card stops working. And he had his son with him. So he was like, I'd hate to ask this of you, but while I sort this out with the bank, could you wire me just, like, a couple hundred dollars?
Dena Temple Raston
And Rebecca responded with all the things you'd expect.
Rebecca d'Antonio
You know, this is a new relationship. We have not met in person. I don't really know you. You know, you're on a work trip. Can't your work do something for you? And the thing is, he was an independent contractor. Like, there was always an answer for everything. And so what it boiled down to was, was I gonna be that person? Was I gonna be that monster that would leave an innocent child in a bad situation?
Dena Temple Raston
Of course, she wasn't. So she sent the money. Over the next several months, he seemed to have a series of unexpected emergencies.
Rebecca d'Antonio
He needed money for groceries. His son got sick. Money to pay the hotel bill. He needed money to pay his workers. He needed money.
Dena Temple Raston
And when all was said and done, she ended up sending him over $100,000.
Rebecca d'Antonio
And the thing is, just because I gave him $100,000 doesn't mean I had $100,000 to lose.
Dena Temple Raston
She took out loans. She didn't pay bills.
Rebecca d'Antonio
You know, by the end of it, Discover Card was suing me. I was being evicted from my apartment.
Dena Temple Raston
That's when she found the scam haters United Facebook page, and she met Ruth.
Ruth Grover
The first thing I said to Rebecca was, breathe.
Dena Temple Raston
When we come back, these scammers have a playbook. And it was leaked publicly. Giving the world an inside look at the how to rules of rob romance scams. We'll tell you what it says and explain how someone looking for a love connection can find themselves doing something they never imagined. Laundering money.
Ronnie Tokozowski
They will actually get brainwashed to a point where they don't realize what they're doing. They just keep on rolling with it.
Dena Temple Raston
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Os Velozjin
Do you ever feel like you blinked your eyes and then woke up in some kind of sci fi movie?
Rebecca d'Antonio
Suddenly it seems like the very existence of AI is changing everything, including our relationships. I would like to think that I could not fall in love with an AI companion, but I really think that anybody could.
Os Velozjin
I'm Os Velozjin.
Rebecca d'Antonio
And I'm Cara Price.
Os Velozjin
We break down the tech news you really need to know. Listen to tech stuff in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dena Temple Raston
You'Re listening to, click here. I'm Dena Temple Raster. If you're gonna talk about romance scams, you have to start with the Yahoo Boys.
Ronnie Tokozowski
So Yahoo Boys are traditionally Nigerian scammers.
Dena Temple Raston
This is Ronnie Tokozowski. He was the principal threat advisor with a company called Cofens. They help a lot of businesses that get hacked. It's something called Business Email Compromise or.
Ronnie Tokozowski
BEC Business Email compromise is one of the largest crimes out there, and a lot of it ties back to Nigerian fraud. And that might sound like a weird segue to go from tracking that over to romance scams, but what we identified is for every different type of bec attack that's out there, virtually every case uses a romance victim as the money mule.
Dena Temple Raston
Scammers are running lots of cons at the same time. Their romance schemes, email compromises, check fraud, you name it, and they've found a way to leverage them all off each other. For example, after scammers steal money from companies, they need a way to move the money out of the country without raising suspicion. Their romance victims end up helping them there too. Scammers ask them to open bank accounts under their own names, and then they send them the money and ask them to reroute it back, which makes it much harder for authorities to track and trace it.
Ronnie Tokozowski
And that's one of the biggest things people don't realize. The diversification that many of these scammers have is that they're running multiple different types of scams at the same time.
Dena Temple Raston
And to help keep their scams straight and on task for the romance portion of their cons, they have an instruction manual that's a literal play by play. Social catfish, a California based online investigation service, got access to one of those manuals and then released it publicly. It's 23 pages long, single spaced, and it feels really craven. There's a section called ways to say hi to a client. Pick one below. Notice they use the word client and not target or victim. There's a subsection entitled fun flirty hellos. You just cut and paste things like, I want this message to be the reason you smile at your screen. Or do you ever feel like something really great's about to happen? I kind of feel that way now. One of my favorites. I bet my dog would like you.
Ronnie Tokozowski
So one of the first things that happens for a romance scam is your scammer will go and create a document or a template, if you will, of bodies of text that they can copy paste back and forth to the victims. Once they have those bodies of text, I've seen cases where it'll be 26 layers deep that they can copy paste.
Dena Temple Raston
Then they go find pictures. They might scrape Instagram or grab pictures from Facebook.
Ronnie Tokozowski
They might go and scrape some other dating profile in order to kind of build that Persona and build that identity, and they'll go and make the profile as enticing as possible.
Dena Temple Raston
On page four of the playbook, there's a section called Keeping up with. Build that comfort with her before preaching love. What's your favorite movie? Is a suggested question. And the scammers are supposed to say, wait for it. Titanic is the only one for me. Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls. Pages 14 through 18 are all about sweet nothings you can cut and paste into an email. Hello, my queen. I think about you all the time. You get the idea. And then it begins to focus on money. Just a loan. I'll pay you back. I hate to ask. And then, because they trust you, they say they will send you money if you'll just open a bank account in your name. It never occurs to the target that they're laundering cash. Ruth Grover, for her part, wants the world to get to the point where romance scams get stopped in their tracks.
Ruth Grover
I'm the biggest marriage wrecker in the world.
Dena Temple Raston
She wants them to go the way of those Nigerian prince just needing alone emails. You know, the ones everyone and now just about everybody ignores.
Ruth Grover
What I would like to get to the point where everybody knows about it. So if you do get an orthopedic surgeon, if you do get a military man, you look at it and you know that that is going to be fake. And they just get rid of it.
Dena Temple Raston
Getting to that point is taking a lot longer than she thought it would.
Ruth Grover
When I did this, and my little head thought I was going to sort romance scams in a couple of years, you know, I had all these lofty ideas. Ten years later, it's ten times worse.
Dena Temple Raston
And she's right, it is getting worse. In 2022, the Federal Trade Commission released data on romance scams. It said that 70,000 consumers reported losses of $1.3 billion. That's as much as the previous five years combined. And the actual number is probably much higher than that. This is click here. Click Here is a production of recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Gaeda, Zach Hirsch and Casey Giorgi. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Covedo and fact checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston with additional music from Blue Dot sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Nislonger. Find us on X or Facebook @Clickheareshow or leave us a voice message at 6615ch. Talk. Sometimes we'll turn those moments into reporting, sometimes into a conversation. And sometimes into a future story you'll hear on this show. I'm Dena Temple Raston, and thanks for listening.
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Host: Dena Temple Raston
Date: February 13, 2026
Podcast by: Recorded Future News
This special Valentine’s Day episode explores the evolving world of romance scams — a dark underbelly of the internet where emotional manipulation, financial exploitation, and even international money laundering exist side by side. Host Dena Temple Raston profiles Ruth Grover, a British widow who turned her own brush with scammers into founding Scam Haters United, a group dedicated to exposing romance scams and providing victims with support. The episode also reveals how romance scams have become multifaceted criminal enterprises, examining leaked scammer “playbooks,” the involvement of money mules, and heartbreaking real-life losses.
On the onset of scams:
On the effect of scams:
On victim experience:
On the criminal playbook:
On Ruth’s goal:
The episode blends warmth, empathy, and sometimes biting humor, driven by Dena Temple Raston’s curiosity and Ruth Grover’s frank, sometimes cheeky British charm. Despite the heavy subject, the episode maintains a tone of resilience and determination, emphasizing real-world solutions and community support.
For listeners and non-listeners alike, this episode provides a human lens on a digital epidemic — warning, supporting, and urging vigilance against online exploitation in the search for love.