Clay County Sheriff warns of TikTok romance scam that cost local man $120,000
By Eric Graves
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LIBERTY, Mo. (KMBC) — The Clay County Sheriff’s Office is trying to track down a scammer that tricked a local man out of $120,000 over the course of several months.
Sarah Boyd, public relations manager for the sheriff’s office, said the 61-year-old victim met the person on TikTok.
The suspect claimed they were a 34-year-old woman named Lisa.
Boyd said “Lisa” first reached out to the victim last year but got no response. In March, “Lisa” reached back, and this time the victim responded.
Over multiple months, Boyd said the victim thought he was building a relationship with this online profile posing as the 34-year-old house keeper named Lisa.
A big red flag came when the scammer asked the victim to start messaging on a different app.
“She asked him to move that conversation over to telegram, which is an encrypted messaging app,” Boyd said. “And that’s a very common practice that scammers use is to move conversations to an encrypted app, because they’re very hard for anyone to track.”
From there, Lisa started to have a series of emergencies and ask for help.
“It starts out small,” Boyd said. “Like in this case, they start asking for gas money, then for some pricier car repairs.”
Boyd said the victim was originally sending money through CashApp, but she said his account shutdown.
That was when another major red flag came up, the scammer asked the victim to send them money through cryptocurrency.
“That cryptocurrency is almost impossible to get back,” Boyd said.
Boyd said the victim sent BitCoin to the scammer from two different BitCoin ATMs, one in Excelsior Springs and another in Kearney.
“Scammers ask folks to withdraw cash from their bank, they put it in the cryptocurrency machine, the Bitcoin ATM, and then that gets transferred,” Boyd said. “The cash gets transferred to an account somewhere in the world.”
Over time, Boyd said the scammer built up trust with the victim, eventually asking for a huge sum of money.
“Finally, she said that she needed to sell her mother’s house,” Boyd said. “But she had to pay these back taxes on it and needed his help, paying those taxes, and said she would pay him back when the house sold.”
Boyd said this is where the victim lost the majority of the $120,000.
After this, the victim told his adult daughter what was happening. His daughter recognized the scam and came to the sheriff’s office.
The victim is now short $120,000 with few avenues for law enforcement to recover this swindled money.
“A lot of these folks are overseas,” Boyd said. “They can digitally cover their tracks, make it look like they’re at one IP address when they’re really at another. It is unfortunately very unlikely we’ll be able to identify a suspect in this case. We’re going to give it our best shot.”
Boyd said this is a textbook romance scam.
“They build up a relationship with these folks and it becomes an emotional relationship,” Boyd said. “It’s not transactional to the victim. It’s somebody they care about. Even though they may have never met them, they feel that they care about them. So it’s really hard for them to see what’s happening as a scam, because if that’s true, their heart gets broken, too.”
Boyd said it’s such a common scam there are likely more happening across the metro right now.
She wants potential victims to know what to look for.
“Somebody you’ve never met who you’ve only had contact with online asking for money,” Boyd said. “Anyone asking you to send money via cryptocurrency is big red flag and a lot of times the victims of this are very secretive because they think their loved ones will try to break the relationship up.”
Boyd said loved ones of possible victims need to keep an eye out, too.
“We want loved ones to look for, like, strange and excessive expenditures,” Boyd said. “Like, where is their money going? You know, that kind of thing. Show them examples of what has happened because they don’t want to believe that it’s a scam.”
The Clay County Sheriff’s Office is working to add warning labels and scam alert stickers to every cryptocurrency ATM in the county.
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