I've looked into a lot of online scams, but one that can't get out of my mind involves a man pretending to be Keanu Reeves who approached and befriended a single, older woman named Diane via an online game app. He smothered a lonely, naive person with daily attention, sending her small gifts and eventually expressing his love for her, as unlikely as that sounds. They had a Zoom session in which Diane claimed to see, “from a distance,” what appeared to be the actor’s face.
Diane was in the process of becoming a victim of what scammers call a “pig butchering” scheme. They first “fatten up” their victims by building trust via tactics such as faking romantic interest or pretending to offer investment mentoring. Sometimes this process continues for months, but eventually the time for “butchering” comes. Typically, it culminates with the victim feeding tens of thousands of dollars into a Bitcoin ATM in a convenience store located in a shady part of town.
After softening Diane up, “Keanu” told her he was involved in a legal dispute with his manager, “Erwin,” over proceeds earned from The Matrix. The FBI had supposedly locked his bank account due to the lawsuit, so he needed her to send him money via Bitcoin, which scammers love because it's so hard to trace. He kept asking for more, which she got by taking out loans, selling her house, and sending him most of her paychecks.
“Keanu” told Diane he wanted to fly her to Europe to meet him, but his private plane had mechanical problems. He then sent her a picture of a home in Buffalo that was going to be “our home.” Diane followed his instructions to sell her car to buy a plane ticket to the upstate New York city, but he canceled this plan too.
The man calling himself Keanu then offered, once again, to fly her to Europe. Despite enduring all of his conniving and thievery, Diane was excited about the trip. She said her mom, who she had to move in with, was also convinced this was the real Keanu Reeves. But the police showed up at her door and blew the lid off of the whole scam, which ended up costing her around $160,000.
The scamming business has come a long way from the time when “Nigerian princes” emailed people asking them for all their bank account information. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, they stole a record $16.6 billion from American victims in 2024—up roughly 33 percent from the prior year.
My uncle forked over thousands of dollars to criminals who'd convinced him, with a phone call, that they'd kidnapped his granddaughter. Two people I know fell for the “boss scam.” They received phony (“spoofed”) emails, supposedly from their bosses, instructing them to go immediately to a store and buy hundreds of dollars in gift cards, which scammers can turn into cash. I wondered why these two even told me about it in the first place.
Technology has supercharged this type of criminal enterprise, turning what used to be low-yield individual schemes into high-volume, low-risk profit machines for transnational syndicates. Emails cost nothing. Crypto-currency allows for anonymous, instant cash transfer. Social media and dating apps enable one operator to target millions instantly. AI has removed the barriers that once remained. Voice cloning and deepfakes now create indistinguishable impersonations in seconds. A piece of advice: never answer a phone call from an unknown number.
Scammers are an evil bunch who have no compunctions about talking a retired widow into turning her 401k account over to them and then getting her to sell her house so she can send them more cash. But the most evil are no longer content to just fleece the unsuspecting. They've developed elaborate systems to turn their victims into scammers who they force to work for them. Scamming now operates on a sophisticated, industrialized model that includes vertically-integrated businesses with underground banking, money mules, and money laundering. There are even performance reviews.
The way this works in a huge Asian scam that's under the supervision of Chinese mobsters is that Filipino women are lured to Thailand for online jobs promising more money than they can make at home. Once in Bangkok, where they think they'll be working, the victims are put into a van and driven a long distance before crossing a river. Unbeknownst to them, the boat’s taking them to a fortified compound in lawless Myanmar, where their passports are confiscated. Their new job, 10 hours a day, is seducing men over the telephone and getting them to masturbate on camera to blackmail them. These women are now scammers at the mercy of their captors. To say no is to risk forced prostitution, electric shocks and beatings.
Taking slaves and forcing them to pick cotton is an example of extreme immorality. Taking slaves and then forcing them into becoming predators themselves is a few levels below that on the inhumanity scale. Murderers take lives which can never be replaced, but there are often psychological compulsions or emotions they can't control driving their behavior. No such extenuating compulsions or emotions are behind the scam factories in Asia. Those scammers don’t stop at one crime; they manufacture an entire ecosystem of predation which robs victims of their humanity first when they're kidnapped, and again when they're forced to become criminals.
I've heard experts claim that modern scams are designed to fool normal, intelligent people by targeting their emotional vulnerabilities, trusting nature, or loneliness. At the end of many podcasts dealing with scams, the narrator stresses that these scammers are clever enough to fool anyone. It's considered insensitive to disagree with this assessment, so instead of engaging with the “intelligence” debate, I'll just say that anyone who hands over their life savings, often in many installments, to someone who's no more than a voice over the phone lacks common sense. Common sense requires not giving all of your money away. If you give all of your money, home, and car to someone you believe is Keanu Reeves, it's gone beyond a matter of common sense.
The law has a hard time keeping up with scammers. Most perpetrators scamming Americans from abroad face few consequences. In one case I heard about, the FBI tricked a scammer into traveling to the U.S. and arrested him, but this is rare. The scamming model’s evolving too fast for the defenses to keep up. The result is one of the most massive involuntary wealth transfers in history.
