You’d like to think you’d never fall for a romance scam, until one day you find yourself a lonely octogenarian overwhelmed by the sliver of attention a stranger is paying you, and you’re willing to toss them your entire life savings just because they asked for it. It will be even more tempting to do so when that person is, say, Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner.
It appears that the concept of the romance scam is now leaving Earth, as an 80-year-old woman in Sapporo, Japan, recently fell for a scammer claiming to be an astronaut in distress, who needed money to get back to Earth.
Published by CBS News but reported by Agence France-Presse, according to police, the fraudster slid into her DMs in July and started wooing her, then informing her that he was, in his words, “in space on a spaceship” and “under attack.”
Naturally, he needed oxygen, which, of course, costs money. This is how space works, and if you don’t know that, then, frankly, you’re stupid.
He convinced her to send him 1 million yen (roughly $6,750) to help him breathe in zero gravity. No word on whether she asked how and who, exactly, sends the oxygen into low Earth orbit. He was a little out of UPS’ reach.
Japan has one of the world’s oldest populations, making it especially vulnerable to these attacks. Scammers target the elderly with a wide range of schemes. Some are good old-fashioned fake insurance refunds. Others are impersonations of relatives in trouble. There’s the aforementioned ultra-famous celebrity who wants to have sex with you, specifically, for some reason, and also wants your money even though they’re richer than you’ll ever be in 10 lifetimes. And now we can add “fake astronaut in space” to the list.
If you’ve got elderly parents or grandparents who you’re afraid might fall victim to one of these traps, remind them that if someone claims they’re calling from space, they probably aren’t. This is especially true if they’re asking for money. There aren’t many places to spend money in space that I am aware of, though I am not an astrophysicist, so I could be wrong.
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