Japanese woman, 80, scammed out of thousands by ‘astronaut stranded in space’ who needed money for oxygen
He promised the stars…
An 80-year-old woman in Japan lost all her life savings to a scammer posing as an astronaut who claimed to be stranded on a besieged spacecraft and needed money to buy oxygen, according to a report.
The galaxy grifter began to orbit the lonely elderly woman from Hokkaido island after meeting on a social media app in July, and attempted to woo the pensioner before unraveling his con.
He told the woman he was an astronaut stranded “in a spaceship right now” which was “under attack and in need of oxygen,” Sky News reported.
She kindly sent the “astronaut” roughly $6,700 to fill his lungs, but cops said he just stuffed his pockets.
Local police in Hokkaido described the case as a typical romance scam that targets vulnerable, often elderly, folks who are easy to trick online.
Similar scams target older folks in the United States and other countries.
A US postal investigator who oversaw the fraud department was charged with stealing more than $330,000 from packages mailed by victims of a scam to criminals in Jamaica.
Many of those victims, who mailed between $1,400 and $19,100, were over the age of 75, according to an indictment.
A French woman was suckered out of $850,000 by a romance scammer pretending to be an ailing Brad Pitt, who used AI-generated selfies of the Hollywood heartthrob in a hospital bed to tug at her heartstrings.
US Sens. Masha Blackburn (R-Tenn) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo), and Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif) introduced the Romance Scam Prevention Act earlier this year, which would require dating apps and services to issue fraud ban notifications to users who have interacted with a person removed from the app.
