More Victims of Online Scams

One woman gave away a mind boggling US$23 million to a "British engineer"

We are still reading more stories of people being duped from online romance scams.

The latest one this week was a 66-year-old widow who thought her boyfriend was a "British engineer" and needed money for his business. So she gave him HK$180 million! (US$23 million) in four years.

Like seriously? Why give anyone that much money -- and on top of that -- to someone you have NEVER MET IN PERSON?

In 2014 they met on the dating website Lovestruck

It's unbelievable that someone would even do something like that, but she has and now police are investigating.

She met the scam artist online on the online dating website Lovestruck in April 2014 and they apparently struck up a relationship.

"The fraudster claimed he had financial difficulties with his business, and asked the victim for money repeatedly between May 2014 and July this year," police said in a statement.

The victim is described as "wealthy" and is said to run a real estate investment company.

During the four-year period she deposited money into bank accounts in Hong Kong, mainland China, Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan, Britain, and Germany in more than 200 transactions.

Throughout the period the fraudster claimed he would pay her back as soon as the engineering project was finished.

90 percent of women are conned into giving away money

It was only after the widow spoke to her family about it did she realize she was duped.

The police report in the last two months, an average of one report per day was made to the authorities about online love scams. Most victims lost between hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions.

While some of the victims were aware of online scams through the news, they didn't think they themselves were being duped.

"They could not believe they had been scammed because they felt deep in the relationship and did not want to pull out," one source said. The scammers were very good at pretending to be "considerate".

Some skeptical people are starting to think these online romance scams are ways of laundering money, putting it in bank accounts around the world, but then why cry foul about it and get the police involved?

At the same time it's hard to understand why women -- 90 percent of the victims are females -- would be so easily scammed?

There will probably be another victim reported next week...