The woman loses thousands of dollars to the romantic scammer who passes through Astronaut in trouble, says the police in Japan

A Japanese octogenarian was scammed of thousands of dollars after falling in love with a self -written astronaut who sought his help to avoid a spacecraft, the police said on Tuesday.

The unfortunate woman on the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan met with the scammer in July on social networks who claimed to be a male astronaut, a local police officer told the News, who described the case as a romantic scam.

After some exchanges, the scammer one day told him that he was “in space in a spacecraft at this time” but he was “under attack and needed oxygen,” said the official.

Then, the scammer urged him to pay him online to help him buy oxygen, and around 1 million yen ($ 6,700) of it was fooled successfully.

The woman lives alone and began to develop feelings for him as her communication online advanced, local media said, including Hokkaido Broadcasting, citing research sources.

“If a person who met on social networks once demanded cash, suspected the possibility of fraud and reports to the police,” said the official.

Japan has the second oldest in the world population After a small monaco, according to the World Bank, and the elderly often fall prey to several forms of organized fraud.

These include the classic “it’s me” scam, where perpetrators are passed through family members in trouble extract money from the victim.

The elderly can also be coatus to use ATMs to obtain non -existent “refunds” of their insurance cousins ​​or pensions, the police warned.

Romantic scammers drain billions of dollars from people looking for love, and their tactics have evolved sinister in the online era. More than 64,000 Americans were taken for more than $ 1 billion in romantic scams in 2023, twice the $ 500 million only four years earlier, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Approximately half of the people who are using Quotation sites say that they have encountered someone who has tried scam According to representative Brittany Pettersen, a Colorado Democrat who says that technological platforms must do a better job to protect their users.

“It doesn’t matter how advanced think about their ability to understand what there is, they will be deceiving so many people and we really have to be facing this,” republican representative David Valadao de California He told News themezone last year.

• Scam alert
• Japan