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    Christmas season is also catfishing season. Don't fall for a romance scam

    by Jon Healey, Los Angeles Times Dec 20, 2021 5 minutes

    The season of holiday cheer is also the peak time for scammers offering bogus romance. Thousands of Americans looking for a new love to help usher in the new year will instead be beguiled by online con artists who use fake identities and empty promises to talk the lovestruck out of their savings — or worse.

    More Californians report being victimized by these frauds than any other state's residents, a testament to the state's size if not necessarily its collective loneliness. And while the top targets in 2020 were people 40 to 69 years old, the Federal Trade Commission said in February, the number of reported victims rose in every age group.

    Consumers reported more than 30,000 of these scams to the FTC in 2020, three times as many as in 2016, with losses quadrupling to $304 million. The median loss was $2,500.

    Are we growing more gullible? Who knows? What we do know has been a , helping them woo their marks from a distance and accelerating the growth in these crimes.

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