A man planning to dump his girlfriend after she lost $14,500 in a crypto scam is being backed online.
Venting his frustration on Reddit‘s r/TrueOffMyChest forum on August 2, user u/Comfortable_Soft7418 said he can no longer take his girlfriend’s “naivety,” after she lost her college tuition fund to a scam on social media.
“She knows nothing about crypto at all, nobody we know invests in it, and she fell for the scam over Twitter,” he wrote.
“That money was not just hers, her parents and I contributed most of it. She only works part-time as a server so it really feels great to know that the last 5 months of saving away has been for nothing because she naively thought a 12-hour-old account on Twitter was going to give her 50 bitcoins because she won a giveaway.”
According to the Federal Trade Commission, one in four people who fell victim to a scam in 2021 said the ruse began with a social media ad, message or post. This made social media the most profitable funnel for con artists last year, with over 95,000 Americans losing $770 million to this type of fraud. Losses from social media scams in 2021 were 18 times higher than in 2017, with an increase in cases reported across all age groups.
Despite the belief that older people are most at-risk, data shows that younger people actually fall for scams more often. The 18- to 39-year-old age group are twice as likely as older people to be conned on social media, with the biggest losses tied to scammers posing as online retailers.
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