Catfish Scams — How To Spot Red Flags

Catfish Scams — How To Spot Red Flags

Will Kenton  Sun, October 26, 2025   Moneywise

Missouri woman's late-in-life love story turns into a Ramsey Show warning about catfish scams — how to spot red flags

Nicky from Missouri called into the The Ramsey Show with a late-in-life love tale. (1) She, a 68-year-old widow, has met a man, an 81-year-old widower, who wants to marry her. At first it seems like a heart-warming story, but when co-hosts hosts Jade Warshaw and Ken Coleman started asking questions, things went sideways fast.

Nicky started asking if she should mix her finances with her new suitor. She indicated her savings were much larger than his. The co-hosts asked how they met, and she told them that they had met on Facebook in a group for widows and widowers. They bonded when he told her about a woman he had been seeing. He was giving her money, and even though he supposedly has a pension that pays over $100,000 per year, Nicky felt she was taking advantage of him. The relationship apparently ended soon afterward, and Nicky ended up as his new lady.

She then admitted she’d never seen him face to face. In fact, he lives six hours away. Wedding bells turned to alarm bells as Jade and Ken pulled more suspicious details out of her.

When they expressed dismay at the idea that she’d even think about marrying a man sight-unseen, she said “he is too open and honest!”

Coleman laid it all on the table: “Nicky, you have a hook in both sides of your mouth right now, and this needs to stop.”

Without proof to the contrary, he suggested she might be the victim of a catfish or romance scam.

Scams Preying On The Elderly Are Common

Romance scams are a big slice of the fraud problem for older adults. The FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report shows people 60 and over filed 147,127 complaints with reported losses of about $4.8 billion. Confidence and romance fraud alone accounted for 7,632 of those complaints and $389 million in losses.

TO READ MORE:  https://finance.yahoo.com/news/missouri-womans-life-love-story-100000867.html