From what we can gather, for at least the last year, my grandma (78) has been romance scammed by some piece of shit pretending to be Ronan Keating (member of the band Boyzone).
My younger siblings started to notice suspicious messages popping up on her phone strewn with the typical “darlings” and “sexys” and poor grasp of English. So they were obviously concerned and went through her phone and found a full on conversation. Looks like it started on Facebook and then progressed to WhatsApp. Looks like your typical romance scam with a sprinkle of impersonation. Just incessant love bombing and affection.
Some background about my grandma is that she’s incredibly strong willed/stubborn and once her mind is made up about something, nothing is going to change it. This can lead to a lot of lying and manipulation to save face because she can absolutely never admit she is wrong (see where this is going). My grandad passed away 15 years ago and she’s not properly been in any romantic relationship since to the best of our knowledge.
The sad thing is she’s always been so cautious and careful about scams and things so I thought she’d be the last person to fall for something which the rest of us can clearly see is an obvious scam. But I guess that’s why these things work. Elderly people, especially lonely ones, are more likely to not see all the red flags when they’re getting some sort of need met.
Anyway, the family confronted her (totally wrong approach we discovered later upon research) when they discovered all these messages. The scam was still in the early stages back then, building trust and affection, not asking for money yet. She immediately became defensive and denied everything, even when confronted with the evidence of screenshots we had. We tried our hardest to convince her that it wasn’t really Ronan Keating, the poor grasp of English, the clearly photoshopped images, the fact he is a 49 year old married celebrity and she is a 78 year old great grandmother (it was delivered slightly nicer than that I promise).
We reached out to other family members and her friends to advise them of the situation and see if they could help her realise it was a scam. We asked her if he had asked her for money yet and warned her that was where it was going. She eventually seemed somewhat receptive to what we were saying, but she also put passcode locks on her phones so my siblings couldn’t look through her phones when they were there.
My mother thought we had done all we could, plus she went through a period of not talking to any of us (pretty normal with how toxic our family is). Essentially everything regarding this stopped being discussed. My family tried to be more vigilant but she started becoming more secretive.
Fast forward to now. My mother, stepdad, 3 siblings are all abroad on holiday for 2 weeks. My grandma is having a nap and my sisters grab her phones. They’re no longer passcode locked. They discover this scam never stopped. She never stopped engaging.