Gianfranco Bonzi was a caretaker of a building in Milan, therefore a reliable and down to earth person. Close to sixty years old, he was targeted by a gang of scammers who, posing as the singer-songwriter and composer Dua Lipa, offered him easy earnings with cryptocurrencies. Gianfranco didn’t care much about money, but he begun to fall in love with the mirage of gentle manners and feminine features created by criminals. When he discovered that it was all a scam, the five thousand euros thrown away was probably the least of his problems; the poor man couldn’t handle, above all, the disappointment in love and the shame of having fallen for it.
Gianfranco left home on March 23rd, 2024 and he didn’t give further news about himself, after leaving a hopeless message on social media: “This is the last post that I publish and also one of the last actions of my life. The cause: a disappointment in love that I couldn’t handle.”
Friends of Gianfranco and his son Luca Bonzi made several appeals on television, but on 22 June the lifeless body of the missing Gianfranco Bonzi was found in the Adda river near Crotta D’Adda, in the province of Cremona.
Romance scams are on the increase.
My detective agency Octopus investigates on romantic scams more and more often. In these cases, the private investigator can only prevent it, if you consult him before being deceived, or bring you back down to earth, when he is consulted too late. In order to illustrate how hard it is to help romance scam’s victims: recently a worried lady called my detective agency Octopus to track down an “old friend of hers” who no longer stayed in touch with her from a couple of months. I asked her to send me the data she knew about him to give her a quote, and from that data it was clear it was a romantic scam. I expressed my doubts to her, making her angry. I struggled to get her to admit that she had never met this “friend” in person, but they had only had telephone contacts. Every time I pointed her out grammatical errors in documents presented by the scammer or the non-existence of addresses provided and falsehoods in photographs or videos he sent, I had to arguing with the victim of the scam, as if I were the one deceiving her. When she finally realized she was scammed out of $450,000, despair and desperation followed; not so much due to the amount, because she was a very rich person, but rather for the disappointment.
As a private detective I had to improvise as a psychologist and I recommended her to ask for a professional help; fortunately she did it , because the risk of depression and suicide among these victims is very high.
Not even Local Police, Interpol and the FBI (https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/scams-and-safety/common-frauds-and-scams/romance-scams), slowed down by international jurisdictions and letters rogatory, can do much against these dangerous scammers. To prevent the phenomenon, they have created computer alerts on sending money to already known scammers, but these are well-branched criminal organizations with infinite resources among affiliates and front men.
Scammers almost always operate from areas of the world where there are no international collaboration agreements and it is difficult to obtain help from local authorities.
In the case of poor Gianfranco Bonzi, the Prosecutors Cristiana Roveda and Marcello Viola have undertaken a courageous judicial initiative, opening a case for incitement to commit suicide, but I doubt there will be a follow-up. At most they will be able to identify some participants in the scam and include them in the Interpol blacklists.
How to recognize romance scams and prevent them
Since there is very little you can do when you are scammed by these scoundrels, other than filing a denunciation (which is always advisable), let’s see how to recognize romance scams and prevent them:
- Do online researchs on your new acquaintance, entering the declared details into search engines and also doing image searches on sites such as https://pimeyes.com/en, https://socialcatfish.com (available only by extra European connections), https://images.google.com/, https://tineye.com/, etc.
- Check all the data of your new acquaintance also on websites to prevent romance scams or simply type name and surname followed by a keyword such as romantic scam, romance scams, scammer, etc.
- The photographs, used by the criminal as his own, are often stolen from other profiles and recycled to commit the scam. However, the absence of matches in these online searches does not mean that you are out of danger, but simply that the scammers could be using new or never published photographs and videos.
- Never send your videos and photos before you are sure your new acquaintance is not a scammer, otherwise you could risk to have your greeting clips and photos recycled to create another fake character and attract another victim.
- Pay attention to the coherence between mother tongue, place of birth and origin, studies done, cultural level of your new acquaintances, and compare all these data with the kind of posts or communications sent. If your new acquaintance speaks in a foreign language, ask a native speaker about his speech. Fraudsters almost always pretend to be cultured and very wealthy people, yet they write and think differently from who they pretend to be.
Recently a foreign lady called my detective agency Octopus because she had met a man who told her that he was from Italy in Lombardy, but that he always lived in Portugal and had only recently moved to Milan, furthermore he said he had a degree and worked for the government (declaring government or military or UN jobs is a red flag in itself).
I watched some video messages sent by the man to my client: they were generic messages and crudely cut at the beginning or at the end so as not to show the name of the person they were referring to, the subject’s speech was that of a Roman with poor level of schooling. It was clear that the scammer reused videos of another unsuspecting victim.
- Do the litmus test by demanding a video call, and consider suspicious any excuse or technical difficulty invented to avoid it.
Even if you receive a seemingly flawless video call, keep in mind that A.I. works miracles in recent times, so video record the conversation and have it analyzed by an expert.
- When your online acquaintance starts asking you for money, consider it a definitive proof that he or she is a scammer.
Ask yourself if it is normal that a just met online big businessman or famous surgeon or high-ranking United Nations official or doctor without borders or world-famous engineer or architect or high finance expert, should temporarily need a loan right from you or he should share million-dollar earnings right with you.
It’s wrong to blame yourself, it can happen to anyone.
Let’s argue about shame, depression and the risk of suicide. Romance scams are sneaky and have no element of dexterity, because they focus on large numbers, exploiting the loneliness, fragility and distraction of potential victims. The scammer plays an endless series of chess games on many boards and when he wins it is not due to his skill but due to the distraction of the potential victim.
Many scammers’ victims, who belatedly contact my Octopus detective agency, say they feel worse than robbed, because they helped the thief. This last detail leads victims to a dangerous prostration. However, we must be consider psychological fragility and distraction such as immunosuppression that none of us can fully control.
In fact, as a private investigator I assisted very cultured and intelligent people who were victims of romantic scams, therefore it is useless to blame ourselves for something over which we have minimal or nonexistent control.
Love dating scam sites.
Lately several Clients call my Octopus detective agency because, by signing up on a dating site, delude themselves thinking that they have found the love of their lives. However, the suitor disappears when the relationship is supposed to move to the next level with the exchange of emails or personal phone numbers. Frequently, the private investigators of my Italian detective agency found that the suitor was paid by the dating site to create traffic.
Looking for a soul mate on dating sites lead to double danger:
- Running into a romantic scammer, who exploits the website as his hunting ground.
- Or, when the dating website is not very serious, you might receive the attentions of a false subscriber, who, in reality, is a “collaborator” of the dating website with the task of enlivening the experience for the subscribers and inducing them to pay as much as possible for subscriptions or paid connections.
Let’s see which red flags should induct to suspect this risk:
- Negative reviews on the dating site must be heeded.
- Excessive commercial proposals by the website to build customer loyalty with subscriptions and other forms of paid connections.
- Contact proposal by a suitor with too perfect appearance and social level.
- The suitor sends many photographs personal with predominantly professional poses, such as to suspects a strong narcissistic personality (already nefarious in itself) or an activity based on physical appearance (escort, actor, stripper, etc.).
- These fake suitors don’t personalize video messages sent to their beloveds. That is to say, they never say the name of the addressee, or other details that would make the video unusable with another subscriber.
In some cases, carefully watching the videos, it became clear that the false sender was reading all the love phrases that flowed naturally from his or her heart.
