65
Woman loses thousands of dollars to romance scammer posing as astronaut in distress
(www.cbsnews.com)
He was over the moon when she sent the cash
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
65 points (98.5% liked)
Offbeat
1730 readers
31 users here now
Post your funny, weird, strange, or quirky news stories here!
Community Rules
- No editorialized titles
- No satire news sites (The Beaverton, The Onion, etc...)
- No politics
- Submissions must be no older than 2 months (i.e. the article should be "recent" news)
Similar Communities
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Maybe this is a dumb question, but with digital transactions shouldn't it be easy to track the scammer and/or reverse the transaction? I mean, if digital transactions have no protections, then why not use cash for everything?
There's two barriers to that. Banks don't want to reverse transactions without a court order, because they would then be very embarrassed and also get sued if the transaction turned out to be legitimate. So they can reverse transactions, but only after the court orders it.
The other thing is that scammers know that. This is why they often demand payment via Western Union, gift cards, etc. They also often use "money mules": other scam victims who take the money and then send it to the scammer's account, taking a cut. The scammer periodically closes accounts and opens new ones, so if their assets get frozen they don't lose too much. (The money mule scam victims are sometimes just being conned into helping the scammer, but sometimes they end up getting scammed themselves, such as by being sent bad checks. They can't go to the police because they're guilty of a crime.)
Just wait till you're stuck in orbit and nobody will buy gift cards for you!
I was actually really surprised that this happened in Japan. I immediately thought southern states, or Alberta 😉
People are people all over the world. I wonder if there has been any research into the psychology of people who get scammed this way? They seem so blind to what is really obvious to their friends and relatives.
🎶 All the lonely people, where do they all come from… 🎶
Got to be more to it than loneliness.
Granted they are an octogenarian, but wouldn't it be great if there where something a person could connect to and look up all the people who are "actually in space" at this time?
Maybe a world wide web of information say.