Journalist Mariana Van Zeller has gone undercover to expose romance scammers, posing as a lonely divorcée on dating apps and eventually confronting one fraudster face-to-face for the new National Geographic series Super Scam Me.
Van Zeller, 50, created an online persona named Mary Zelle, a recent divorcée from Arizona with children at university, and signed up to popular dating sites including Tinder. Within minutes of creating the profile, scammers began contacting her. “It turns out that Mary Zelle was very popular and for somebody who’s been married for 20 years, that was very nice to see,” she said.
Why She Went Undercover
Van Zeller, who has reported on scams extensively, was frustrated by the focus on victims rather than perpetrators. “It was ‘why did they do that? How could you give money to strangers? How could you be that stupid?’” she recalled. “It would always really bother me, because why aren’t we paying more attention to what the scammers are doing? So I decided the best way to show how good these scammers are is if I place myself in the shoes of the victims.”
The scale of the problem is significant: as many as one in seven adults is thought to have lost savings to romance scammers, totalling $1 billion (£756 million) in the US in the last year alone.
Spotting the Scammers
Van Zeller and her team noticed telltale patterns among suspicious profiles. “We started realising when people actually want to have a drink with me, these are probably not scammers,” she said. Common scammer stories included living far away, being in the military, or working as oil contract workers. She also encountered celebrity scams, once communicating with “three George Clooneys, two Keanu Reeves, several Brad Pitts” after Mary Zelle liked fake fan accounts.
The undercover operation took a personal turn when real-life victim Leslie Pickett from Louisiana reached out. Pickett believed for a year that she was talking to Jon Bon Jovi. Van Zeller decided to confront one of her own scammers to show Pickett the reality and to find out who was behind the fraud.
Confrontation and Impact
With the help of a hacker, Van Zeller tracked down a persistent fake suitor and tricked him into a face-to-face meeting in Ghana. She declined to reveal details, but said he refused to admit he was not in love with her.
Van Zeller also notes that men are just as likely to be victims but often too embarrassed to report it. She praised Pickett’s courage: “There's a lot of shame associated with this type of scam. But she really thought ‘enough is enough. I don't want more people to have to go through the emotional and financial distress I'm living through right now.’”
Super Scam Me started on October 18 on National Geographic and streams the same day on Disney+. Van Zeller’s tips for spotting a scammer include: do they live far away, perhaps on an oil rig or in the military? Do they have an excuse not to meet in person? Do they have trouble communicating or showing their face? Are they your ideal partner and totally smitten? Are they going through a sudden crisis that only you can solve by sending money? At that point, run very far away.
