Super Scam Me Documentary Shows What It Takes to Catch a Romance Scammer

If you received a DM from an unverified Jon Bon Jovi account after commenting on one of his official Instagram posts, what would it take to make you believe he really was the rock star you were hoping to hook up with? And at what point, when he starts asking you to send him money (the kind of money that would make you lose your house), would you snap out of the fantasy and stop emptying your bank account?

In a documentary premiering Saturday:Super scam me—Investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller delves into this toxic terrain of love bombing. In a clip that Ars premieres exclusively below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt to bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.

Scam a romance scammer

Airing on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” becomes blurred in romance scams that, according to the Federal Trade Commission, cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.

These scams, which often target older women of means who lack community and seek online connections, such as widows or divorcees, are now one of the leading forms of financial fraud in the US, the FTC warned. Most victims never get their money back, and foreign scammers are becoming increasingly sophisticated thanks to artificial intelligence, Experian predicted in January.

In Super scam meViewers have the opportunity to go beyond the story of a single victim and see how romance scams operate so effectively to squeeze funds from the people they target on social media apps like Instagram or dating apps like Match and Tinder. Van Zeller has spent years reporting on the scam industry, and when she saw how many victims were left devastated and stranded by romance scams, she devised a social experiment in which she became the target. His plan quickly worked and he hooked a scammer in Ghana who began posing as a handsome four-star military general overseas named “Mark Turner.”

Relying on a wig, large glasses, and a prosthetic nose to conceal her true identity as a journalist (in case the scammer tried to search her profile for reverse images), van Zeller posed as a middle-aged antiques dealer named “Mary Zelle.” She organized her photos to show that she was a fun girl living her best single life. Once he hooked the scammer, he used the same tactics that uncovered the fake Bon Jovi in ​​a plan to meet his scammer face to face. To locate him, she relied in part on distributing fliers in her neighborhood that included a combined photo of the supposedly loving couple “Mark Turner” made to court “Mary Zelle.”