Quico Alsedo

Updated Tuesday, January 23, 2024-00:12

The police officers from the

Central Cybercrime Unit

couldn't believe it.

Before them, a 70-year-old man "with a wonderful appearance,

so much so that I wanted to take him home and present him to my mother-in-law

," an agent tells EL MUNDO.

Next door, the man's daughters, responsible for him being there, "because they had taken him by force, he repeated that he wanted to leave."

The man "was cultured and wealthy, he expressed himself perfectly and was in good shape... A guy's brush."

But his mind didn't belong to her.

«

He had already spent more than 100,000 euros to an alleged woman he had fallen in love with online

, and his daughters were desperate.

They went to the bank to ask them to please not give them more money, but those at the bank said they couldn't do anything.

"That he was the owner of his actions and his money."

The police officers from the Electronic Commerce Fraud Group of the National Police were eager to show him evidence that he was being scammed, that he had been sending money for months not to a beautiful 60-year-old woman from Córdoba, but to

some Nigerians living in Murcia

, "but nothing, there was no way.

We got to show him letters like the ones he received, but sent to another German scammer,

written in German

, but he didn't see anything, he didn't see reason: he didn't want to part with his love in any way.

For his daughters it was

as if he were burning one 500 euro bill after another

.

The scammers had detected the wound from which he was bleeding: "His wife had committed suicide shortly before, he had suffered an enormous trauma."

That fictitious love had replaced his tragedy with a dream from which the man refused to wake up.

More and more Spaniards "between 50 and 70 years old" are, as police sources confirm to EL MUNDO, the object of scams through the

lover boy

method or the so-called

love scam

(the

love scam

, in Spanish), like the victim for the elderly women murdered in

Morata de Tajuña

(Madrid).

Elderly women who, although their neighbors told them that it was a fraud, that their two Facebook

boyfriends

couldn't be real (one was actually

NATO General Wesley Clark

), refused to believe it and sank into debt until one of their moneylenders he killed them and their disabled brother.

Internet scams grew in Spain by 13% in 2022 compared to 2021 - the data for 2023 will be announced by the National Cybersecurity Institute (Incibe) in a month.

40% of the total were impersonations,

what the Police call "social engineering"

: the manipulation of feelings to obtain money.

Although there is no data broken down by age, the agents assure that "the elderly are increasingly targeted, they are increasingly vulnerable."

For two reasons.

«On the one hand, there are more and more elderly people alone, it is an evil of our time.

And, on the other hand,

they have lost their fear of flirting online

," they say in Unidad.

«They see their children and grandchildren meet people that way, and they want to too.

They have lost the fear of meeting people that way, and also of leaving their own information there:

they themselves build the fictitious character with which the scammer cajoles them

.

The experts make it clear that "anyone can fall into this type of scam, they just have to have the right wound," but in the case of the elderly, "with their naivety when it comes to exposing themselves," they

become

collaborators

of their own scam

.

«They put on the social network or the contact application whatever: 'I love to travel, I want to take on the world and go to Japan.'

And, wow, just his better half shows up, who coincidentally also wants to go to Japan.

This source follows: "These mafias also know that they are not attacking a 23-year-old kid who doesn't have a penny, but rather a

widowed woman with a lot of assets

, who makes it clear on the internet that she has money to travel and 'enjoy life'." .

And boom.

From there, what happens is narrated to this newspaper by A., who in 2019 was one of the 20 elderly Spaniards scammed by two Nigerian citizens located in Alicante:

"They write to you every morning: 'Good morning.'

They dedicate songs to you.

They take care of you, they accompany you.

"They fill your emptiness

," explains the woman, who when she uncovered herself, she began to act as "an unofficial psychologist for others."

They had all been deceived with the photo of a good-looking Brazilian neurologist that A., when the scammers sent her contradictory messages and she began to smell the toast, found on dozens of pages that warned about scams: the one she believed was her

love

,

a widowed Israeli military surgeon trapped in a Sinai base

, was actually the bait for the deception.

"There is a double victimization," say former agents of the Technological Research Brigade: "First, these people have been deceived in the crudest way a person can be: in their privacy.

They have entrusted their deepest desires to criminals, thinking they were their lovers

.

And then, when the cake is revealed, they are the fools of the family or the town.

It's hard to accept.

"Many and many do not report for that reason."

Also, probably, because coupled with

love

comes the promise of financial gain

- the lover is about to get a lot of money -

and a not-so-confessable greed ends up entangled in love.

A. speaks: «I asked myself: 'How is it possible that I have fallen into such a pantomime?'

But others took it worse.

They had cheated me out of 10,000 euros, but I was helping a lot to

a girl from Granada who had robbed her father to send 30,000 euros to these scammers...

».

The network swindled 500,000 euros from these twenty women, but only one of them managed to release 350,000 euros to the Nigerians.

"They are specialists in building your dream love," says psychologist

Juan Castilla

, specialized in Social Gerontology.

«The hook is unbeatable: true love and money, mixing real news and drama.

The reward will come with a secure inheritance or business, for which we only have to make a comparatively small investment.

They do it so well that many times they don't even need to ask for money:

it is the victim themselves who offers to be scammed

.

Then, when everything emerges, "the feeling of loss is so strong that it is like mourning the death of a loved one, it is experienced the same."

"The key step," warns the Police, "is to give them the mobile number and start communicating on WhatsApp.

"You have to insist on seeing the other person on FaceTime, that's where you have to show that everything is a lie."

"But," they warn, "new challenges are also now appearing... And the mafias are already using Artificial Intelligence."

And there we are no longer in the hands of a sub-Saharan scammer, but of the latest technology,

deep fakes

and, for the Police, the agents admit

sotto voce

, the unknown.