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One rainy afternoon in August, Jean Booth scurried up the stairs of a nondescript Thai restaurant tucked into a strip mall off the highway, shook out her blue, shoulder-length hair and took out her phone. She bit her lip; no messages.
Her boyfriend, Donnie, was due to arrive at the airport in a matter of hours, but Jean hadn’t heard from him all day. This little hole-in-the-wall was a pit stop on the way to their new life together. She’d been forced to move into her dad’s house in Ohio since her life fell apart in the spring, in no small part because of Donnie. She told herself that if Donnie didn’t call or message by the time this lunch was over, she’d write him off forever.
She twirled her fork around the steaming noodles in front of her and wondered if Donnie had ever tasted pad thai, if he liked spicy food, if they would ever sit together in a restaurant like this.
Over the next half-hour, Jean checked her phone a few more times. But Donnie didn’t text or call that afternoon. Part of her knew he wouldn’t. They’d never met in person, never even spoken on the phone. Still, Jean wanted so badly to believe he’d really show up this time.
Jean wouldn’t hear from Donnie until hours later, when he’d send a WhatsApp message telling her he couldn’t get a plane ticket, that he was stuck, that he was scared and in danger. When he’d tell her he was sorry, and ask her, again, for money. Jean would then pull into a sprawling parking lot in suburban Virginia, and cry.
She was angry at Donnie, but angrier at herself.
She knew somewhere in the back of her mind that Donnie didn’t exist. She also knew that before she hit the road again, in spite of all logic and months of warnings from everyone in her life, she’d send the money anyway.
___
As a kid growing up in a religious household, Jean found the strict doctrines of Christianity unconvincing. But Jean has always been a believer: in fate, magic and, above all, that people are honest and, more often than not, mean well.
Jean’s faith in the goodness of others had been tested again and again throughout her life, and with each betrayal she found herself a little more guarded. Still, she clung to it.
That faith steadied her during a volatile childhood, and again after her 24-year relationship collapsed. It also made her susceptible to a romance scam, a crime meticulously designed to exploit a victim’s trust.
Romance scams are on the rise across the United States. Last year, more than 49,000 Americans reported losing a collective $1.3 billion to romance scams, according to available FTC data shared with The Associated Press.
That’s an increase of at least 14% and likely more from the previous year. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdowns that fractured communities and frayed the social fabric of society, there are more lonely people than ever.
Still, like Jean, victims of romance scams often figure out they’re being lied to long before they cut off contact. Sometimes they’re manipulated into ignoring or suppressing their suspicions. Sometimes hope overrules logic.
Ally Armeson, the executive director of FightCybercrime.org, has worked with 880 victims, many of whom were caught in romance scams. She likens their conundrum to a desert prison: They see the bars trapping them, but the unbearable desolation outside the prison seems worse.
“They’ve been living this life where somebody loved them, they believed in them, they promised a beautiful future,” Armeson said. “Then, all of a sudden, that life collapses. They’re alone, their money has been stolen. The person who gave them purpose is a ghost they can’t even mourn.”
Some victims take years to shake free of scams. Some never do. And the guilt, shame and social stigma surrounding these crimes compounds the loneliness that propels so many victims into scams in the first place. Many victims Armeson has worked with have considered taking their own lives.
Sitting in the parking lot that hot August evening, Jean thought about taking hers.
“I want to cry, I want to vomit,” Jean said. “I’m at war with myself, and I don’t know which side is going to win.”
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Donnie had come into Jean’s life eight months before, in January 2025.
She was 43, freshly divorced and looking to start over. She’d just moved from Nevada to Maryland and landed a job as a grants administrator for the government. But the Trump administration slashed the federal workforce, and Jean was laid off.
So when Donnie, who was kind and handsome but not intimidatingly so, sent her a message on Match, she figured she had time and nothing to lose.
“Good morning, beautiful,” he wrote.
It had been so long since someone called Jean beautiful. For years she’d struggled with her weight and appearance. In an instant, she remembered how good it felt.
He called himself Daniel Rodriguez Fanelli, Donnie for short. He was a military man, younger than Jean, with blue eyes and a close-cropped haircut, a paratrooper who dropped out of helicopters into war zones across the Middle East and would soon return to the U.S. He was brave, and tender: He had a 4-year-old daughter named Trixie, a little girl with soft, blond hair who looked like his late wife, who’d died in a car accident two years before.
Over the next few weeks, their texts become frequent, then familiar, then flirtatious. Jean started organizing her daily routines around their conversations, and dreaming of their future together — a big house, a blended family, a new beginning.
“I think about you every day,” Jean wrote, 16 days after their conversation began. “It feels both too soon and like we’ve always been here.”
Three weeks after their first conversation, Jean leaned back in a leather chair and balled up her fist to bear the pain of a new tattoo being inked into the fleshiest part of her upper arm: a small heart buoyed by a parachute, for Donnie. She closed her eyes and imagined their first meeting. They would honor fallen troops together, walking through Arlington National Cemetery.
“I sometimes wonder, how can this be real?” Jean asked Donnie 22 days into their relationship. “Am I going to wake up one day and find this was all a dream?”
She knew scammers prowled all corners of the internet. But Donnie was present, interested in her crochet and sewing projects, her rescue cats Orion and Saphyra, her career, her painful upbringing.
And it felt good to believe again in the possibility of a happy ending like the ones in the romance novels Jean read and wrote. She’d self-published five books by then and was working on a sixth, inspired by Donnie. Some nights, when he was stressed or scared, Jean would tell him stories.
Still, she wanted to know for certain she wasn’t making a terrible mistake.
She asked a friend who worked in information security to run a background check, but Donnie had almost no digital footprint. Jean was relieved. After all, he’d told her he was in special operations and had to be careful not to reveal anything personal online.
“I have a really, really hard time letting people in and trusting them because of trauma,” Jean told Donnie. “But you’ve made it easy.”
In the middle of February, Donnie started to seem distant. He told her something was eating at him but was reluctant to say what it was. After Jean pressed, Donnie said the nanny who’d been watching his toddler while he was overseas was threatening to abandon the child unless he sent money.
Jean offered to take care of Trixie instead, but Donnie said no; he didn’t want Jean to meet his daughter this way. Instead, he asked Jean for money.
“This means everything to me, more than you can imagine,” he said. “I love you so damned much and I’m so blessed to have you.”
Jean walked down to the pier near her house, stood by the water and wept. Her best friend, Anne, whom she spoke to each morning, had warned her to be careful, but Jean hadn’t listened. Now Jean wondered how she’d been so foolish.
“Every single thing I was warned about you, you said and did. It was classic, perfectly executed and part of me knew the whole time,” Jean texted Donnie when she got home that night. “Yet that sliver of hope remained.”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to be told how stupid you are for loving someone you met on the internet from every single person in your life?” Jean asked.
Jean cried for two days. All the while, Donnie berated her for doubting him and demanded an apology. Jean relented. Trust was an integral part of love, she thought, and she owed it to him to believe he was telling her the truth.
“I’m sorry,” Jean said, “I have major trust issues that I’ve been working through.”
She sent Donnie $7,800.
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Love is a necessity like food, water and shelter. Scientists have found that humans evolved to rely on each other, and our brains are hardwired to seek out relationships and community, not only for joy and comfort, but for survival.
The COVID-19 epidemic and lockdowns that followed ushered in an acute period of social isolation. In a first-of-its-kind study in 2025, the World Health Organization found that years after the world opened up again, people continue to suffer from loneliness. Estimates for people globally who report loneliness range from 1 in 6 to 1 in 2.
“Social connection is a fundamental biological need,” psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad said. “If it’s lacking, we may seek it out in unhealthy ways.”
Scammers know how to exploit that vulnerability.
Jean sometimes would not hear from Donnie for days and ask if he was safe. He lashed out: She was smothering him, she didn’t trust him, she needed to calm down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll be way more mellow when you come home.”
Jean hadn’t been sleeping well, and she was beginning to feel the stress of unemployment. She had a small nest egg, but it wouldn’t last forever. She told herself that once Donnie came home, everything would be OK.
In March he said he was due back in the U.S. the following week, and Jean was counting down the hours. She asked him again and again when he’d arrive, but he evaded her questions. Her insistence on ironing out details proved to him, again, that she didn’t trust him, he said. Jean apologized.
Jean’s sisters and friends encouraged her to stop talking to Donnie. He’s a scammer, and Jean should know better. Was she stupid? Was she blind?
She knew they could be right. But what if they were wrong? What if this was the love of her life?
Donnie told her these were the same people who had supported her unhappy marriage. Jean started avoiding them.
“I choose you,” she told him.
On the afternoon of March 23, Donnie told Jean he’d be home April 1. Jean burst into tears.
Six hours later, Donnie asked for $3,500, for Trixie’s school fees and uniforms. Jean immediately said yes.
“If you’re serious about me being part of your family, then this is just what partners do,” she said.
Donnie asked Jean if she’d move in with him, to a big house in the Maryland suburbs with a yard and a pool. But there was maintenance work that needed to be done. Could Jean help offset the cost?
Jean offered instead to clean the house herself, and asked for his address. Donnie said no.
“I’m starting to feel like money is the main thing you want me for,” Jean said.
“How can you love a man and not believe him?” Donnie shot back.
“Please don’t be upset with me,” Jean replied. “You deserve someone less broken.”
Jean sent $7,600 for the contractors. She told herself she’d be living in the house one day.
But April 1 came and went, and Donnie didn’t show. Four days later he surfaced: He’d been locked up after punching his officer. The transport and replacements he’d needed to be sent home never came, and he hadn’t slept in days, he said. He was sick and scared, and needed medicine and food.
Could Jean send $3,000 for medicine and food? She did.
___
As the month dragged on, Jean started to get anxious. Donnie promised a FaceTime call one Sunday but abruptly canceled, claiming he’d run out of his allotment of bandwidth.
By then, she’d sent him $27,000.
One day, when Jean was feeling particularly low, she pulled up his Instagram profile. She identified one person Donnie followed who followed him back, and sent her a message. Do you know Donnie Fanelli? Is he real?
To Jean’s surprise, Cindy replied almost instantly. They’d exchanged messages for a few months.
“He’s a bot,” Cindy said. “Some of the things he said, you hear from scammers.”
“And his photos have been used A LOT,” Cindy added.
Jean started to panic. Nothing alarming had come up when Jean had run reverse-image searches on Donnie’s photos months before. But she sat down at her desk and paid a fee to sign up for two deluxe services. In an instant, a pair of photos appeared on her screen: Donnie, in slacks and a black dress shirt posing next to a thin, blond woman in a wedding photo booth. The photo had been posted on social media by the bride.
Jean clicked on the woman’s Facebook page, and her stomach dropped. There were dozens of the same photos Donnie had sent her: Smiling with Goofy at Disneyland, selfies in military fatigues. The AP contacted the couple in the photos for comment but received no reply.
Jean confronted Donnie, and he said it was all a misunderstanding. Someone was using his photos. “This is creepy and crazy,” he said. Besides, didn’t she think it was suspicious, Donnie asked Jean, that all of a sudden, after all this time, these photos appear online?
Jean rationalized. It seemed like an impossible coincidence, but maybe she’d jumped to conclusions too quickly.
By then her life depended on him telling the truth. She hadn’t looked for a place to live, because Donnie had asked her to move into his house. It was April 23, and come May 1 Jean would be homeless. She’d bet not only her heart, but her stability on this man.
A day later Donnie asked for almost $9,000, to complete the paperwork he needed to come home, and Jean fell apart. She told him she needed proof: A photo, right then and there, with a timestamp so she’d know it was real.
“You’re spiraling,” he told her. “You’re so doubtful. Always looking for what’s not there.” He promised that in two weeks, when he came home, she’d know she’d been foolish. “I’m sorry your mind is so unsettled.”
“If I blindly trust you and you don’t show,” Jean said, “you will have shattered my heart.”
She sent the $9,000.
___
Two days later, on April 26, Jean got into her car and started to drive.
Donnie had refused to give her his address. But once, when a digital money transfer wouldn’t go through, he’d given her a mailing address to wire cash to a supposed neighbor. It was in Frederick, Maryland, less than an hour from Jean’s house.
She pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex, walked up to the door and rang the buzzer.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered over the intercom.
“Hi. My name is Jean, and I want to talk to you about Donnie Fanelli.”
The door clicked open.
Elizabeth was around Jean’s age, maybe a little younger. She told Jean that Donnie was the love of her life.
Jean felt rage bubble up inside her. Jean and Elizabeth sat on the couch and sent Donnie a selfie, Jean holding up her middle finger.
“There’s a special place in hell for you,” she told him.
When Jean showed up, Elizabeth had assumed the worst: That her boyfriend of almost a year who’d been deployed overseas had been killed in the line of duty.
Elizabeth had drained her savings, taken out two personal loans and opened multiple lines of credit to support Donnie, who’d promised he’d be home soon. He’d never once mentioned Jean.
As she listened to Jean, Elizabeth’s shock gave way to panic. For weeks Donnie had been sending her money, and instructing her to deposit it into the nanny’s account. One of those deposits had arrived earlier that day: $11,500, from Jean.
Elizabeth, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she hasn’t told friends and colleagues what happened, told The Associated Press that she doesn’t remember much about that afternoon except that it crushed her spirit. That day she knew she would never see the $14,000 Donnie had promised to pay back.
In the following days, the two women texted each other updates. Donnie had told both women the other was crazy and making it all up. They compared details: He’d told Jean his birthday was Aug. 10, and Elizabeth it was Jan. 10. Otherwise his story was remarkably consistent.
“I’m super mad and hurt,” Elizabeth said. “I haven’t blocked him yet.”
“I obviously haven’t blocked him either,” Jean said. “And I’m getting sucked in and want to (expletive) help him.”
Donnie told Jean that when he met her, he had fallen in love and cut it off with Elizabeth. Jean bristled. If that was true, why was Donnie’s number saved as “my love” in Elizabeth’s phone?
He begged, he told her he might die overseas and it would be Jean’s fault. But she clung to her resolve.
Then she stopped hearing back from Elizabeth.
She didn’t know that Elizabeth had gotten a call days after the two women met. A man on the line told her that she’d missed a court date and there was a warrant for her arrest. He told her to stay on the phone as she drove to Walmart and bought $700 in gift cards. When Elizabeth went to check out, the cashier told her to hang up immediately: It was another scam.
She changed her phone number. It was the end of her contact with Donnie, and with Jean.
Jean assumed Elizabeth had blocked her. And she started to reconsider: Was it possible that Elizabeth wasn’t a victim after all?
Her anger was again giving way to hope that maybe there was an explanation.
In early May, Jean enrolled in a 10-week support group for romance scam victims. The faces on her computer screen were of men and women, young and old. They told stories that sounded similar to Jean’s own experience with Donnie. Some wept.
Still, Jean wondered if she’d made a mistake coming to this meeting, if she belonged there. Afterward she texted Donnie. She always said goodnight.
She didn’t tell him about the support group. She didn’t tell him that, in a moment of doubt and fear, she’d reported him to her local police department as a fraud. Instead, she told him she loved him, and she meant it.
Donnie told Jean he’d be home by June but never showed up. He said he’d been waylaid in Syria, stuck in a hotel, terrified. Then, he was in Turkey and lost his passport. He needed money.
She sent $5,000.
___
In the end, Jean didn’t cut off the relationship. It was Donnie who began to pull away.
Jean sent him more money, money she’d needed to pay rent. She moved her belongings into storage. She had nothing left.
“I’d give you my life,” Jean said, “but that’s not worth anything financially.”
She thought about suicide. She went to one last game night with her friends in Maryland. She’d be going to Ohio to live with her parents. They had a tense relationship, but Jean had no other choice.
“I gave you my rent, the last of my money, I’m homeless. That means no more friends, no more game nights,” she told him. Jean wondered how everything had spiraled so out of control.
I’m a stupid girl, Jean thought. I’m a stupid girl with a bleeding heart.
This $5,000 Jean sent, while sitting in that Virginia parking lot in August, was the last. Because then Donnie would all but disappear, resurfacing intermittently to offer excuses for why he hadn’t come home.
When the AP sent a series of text messages to a number linked to Donnie, the person who answered refused to comment and told a reporter to “piss off.” AP also contacted the woman Jean said was Donnie’s nanny, who refused to be interviewed. She denied having played any part in the scam and said she too had at one point been in a romantic relationship with Donnie, calling him “dangerous.”
Over the course of 237 days and 10,449 messages, Jean had given Donnie more than $90,000.
___
Life after Donnie was difficult.
To Jean’s surprise, local investigators told her they’d look into her case, but that’s all she knew.
Some days she missed him. Other days she was angry and fantasized about confronting him. Sometimes she thought of him as Donnie, other times as “it” or “the scam.”
When other men messaged her, asking to talk, she told them off. I know what you’re doing, she’d say. I know you’re a scammer.
One of these guys folded immediately. He admitted that, yes, he was a Nigerian posing as an Englishman. He was wracked with guilt about doing this work, but money was tight and it was all he could think of to make ends meet. His real name, he told her, was Clinton, Clin for short.
He was 27, with a broad smile and sparkly brown eyes. Clin sent her photos of his life in Lagos, and Jean responded with updates from hers in Ohio. She told Clin about Donnie, and about her books. He told her that one day he hoped to open his own stall in one of the markets, selling shoes. Soon they were exchanging messages daily, then video calls. He told Jean he’d saved her photo as his screen saver.
Eventually he started asking if she’d consider visiting him. She demurred. He was too young, she said.
One night in September, Jean told two of her oldest friends about Clin. They warned her that this sounded like another scam. Jean insisted it was different: Clin was honest, she said, and promised he’d never ask her for money.
“Sometimes it’s just nice to have someone say you’re beautiful,” she told them.
On Oct. 7, Clin asked Jean for a favor. He needed money to buy the shoes he planned to sell at his stall.
“I really want to save up and I have a plan of meeting you soon, babe,” he wrote.
Jean sighed, and told him she’d think about it.
Three days later, she sent $400.
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The Associated Press spent a year following Jean Booth as she struggled to break free of a sophisticated romance scam. This story is based on dozens of interviews with Jean, her friends and colleagues, law enforcement officials, psychologists, academics and experts in the field of romance scams, as well as a review of more than 10,000 messages.
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This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between The Associated Press and “FRONTLINE” (PBS) that includes an upcoming documentary. AP journalists Aaron Kessler and Jesse Bedayn contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
