“In space on a spaceship right now.”
The sky’s the limit for how outrageously implausible some scams can get. Actually, try beyond the atmosphere.
An elderly woman in Japan sent thousands of dollars to a trickster who claimed to be an astronaut trapped in space and in danger of suffocating, Agence France-Presse reports. In fairness to the lady, though, she thought they were in love.
The 80-year-old pensioner, who lives in Sapporo, the capital of Japan’s northern island Hokkaido, met the scammer on social media in July, police said, describing it as a romance scam.
Not only did the scammer claim to be a male astronaut, but he soon broke the news to her that he was “in space on a spaceship right now.” And urgently, he was “under attack and in need of oxygen.” So what else could he do but plea to a stranger he just met on the internet for help?
Naturally, cash was the only solution to this unfolding orbital crisis. The scammer convinced the poor old lady — who lived alone — to electronically send around 1 million yen, or $6,750, to buy oxygen.
How that oxygen was supposed to get immediately delivered is anyone’s guess, but that’s enough money to keep the lights on at the International Space Station, which costs around a billion dollars per year in maintenance and upkeep, for a grand total of three or four minutes.
Listen: she was doing her part. (And, to be fair, this isn’t even the first time that an online scammer has claimed to represent an astronaut trapped in space.)
As the AFP reports notes, there’s been a drastic uptick in fraud that targets the lovesick. In the US alone, victims lost around $1.14 billion to romance scams in 2023, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which is double the toll reported in 2021. Strikingly, the median amount of money lost per person was over $2,000 — the highest of any form of imposter scam. Love sure does hurt.
The elderly are especially vulnerable to these internet-enabled cons, romantic or not, and Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world. And while it didn’t take much to dupe this lonely octogenarian, the rise of widely available AI tools is supercharging just how convincing these scammers can be.
Some are using AI-powered “realtime deepfakes” to give themselves beautiful and realistic fake faces that hold up even during live video calls. They’re also using AI voice synthesizers to imitate the voices of their victims’ relatives, fooling boomers, for example, into thinking their grandkid has been taken hostage and needs ransom money. AI chatbots, meanwhile, makes it take exactly zero effort for scammers to keep up lengthy conversations over text.
In other words, your Facebook-addicted, AI-slop-resharing grandparents don’t stand a chance. Maybe, as the tech gets better, neither will you.
More on scams: What Actually Happens If You Sign Up for One of Those Scammy “Online Jobs” Is Pretty Fascinating
