Watch an exclusive clip from where a victim tracks down her scammer.
If you got a DM from an unverified Jon Bon Jovi account after commenting on one of his official Instagram posts, what would it take to make you believe it was really the rock star hoping to connect? And at what point when he starts asking you to send money—like lose-your-house kind of money—would you snap out of the fantasy and stop draining your bank account?
In a documentary premiering Saturday——investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller goes deep into this toxic love-bombing terrain. In a clip that Ars is exclusively debuting below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt and bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.
Scamming a romance scammer
Broadcasting on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” gets blurred in romance scams that the Federal Trade Commission says cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.
Often targeting older women with resources who lack community and seek out connections online, such as widows or divorcées, these scams are now a leading form of financial fraud in the US, the FTC has warned. Most victims never get their money back, and overseas scammers are only getting more sophisticated, thanks to AI, Experian forecasted in January.
In , viewers get a chance to go beyond a single victim’s story and see how romance scams operate so effectively to squeeze funds out of the people they target on social media apps like Instagram or dating apps like Match and Tinder. Van Zeller has spent years reporting on the scam industry, and when she saw how many victims were broken and stranded by romance scams, she devised a social experiment in which she became the target. Her plan worked quickly, hooking a scammer in Ghana who began posing as a handsome overseas four-star military general named “Mark Turner.”
Relying on a wig, big glasses, and a prosthetic nose to cover her true identity as a journalist (should the scammer try to reverse-image search her profile), van Zeller posed as a middle-age antiques dealer named “Mary Zelle.” She staged her pictures to show she was a fun-time gal living her best single life. Once she hooked the scammer, she used the same tactics that outed the fake Bon Jovi in a scheme to meet her scammer face to face. To track him down, she partly relied on distributing flyers in his neighborhood that included a mashup photo of the supposedly loving couple that “Mark Turner” made to woo “Mary Zelle.”
Giving victims hope
On the journey, van Zeller shared her own complicated feelings about the connection she formed with her scammer as they texted day and night. These insights, along with her work to illuminate a path to track down scammers targeting Americans, are critical. Experts largely agree that ending rampant romance scams means engaging communities to show more empathy and pay attention to the signs. That could meaningfully deter threats to victims, who are also victims of social norms that isolate older women.
It’s easy to assume that romance scam victims must be gullible or uneducated, but research suggests that victims tend to be well-educated. In , audiences can see how trust is slowly built in these scams, how shame prevents victims from getting help, and how simply wanting a relationship to be real can lead smart women like the victim in the Bon Jovi case to bankruptcy.
“I’ve spent years reporting on scams, and the reaction I hear most is ‘How could anyone be so stupid? That would never happen to me.’ But it can, and it does happen to anyone,” said van Zeller. “So this time, I made myself the target.”
Fearlessly feeling for these women and flying to Ghana to raise awareness of their struggles, van Zeller highlighted in her documentary the tactics and technologies scammers use. National Geographic touts her documentary as exposing the devastating real consequences of largely unchecked romance scams. The one-hour special notably drops shortly after a congressional investigation into dating app scams ended with a finding that scammers are getting harder to catch, NBC News reported.
Watching makes it feel possible to catch these predators, offering victims and society a glimmer of hope. Although van Zeller easily saw through the scammer’s stolen photos from an actual military general’s Instagram profile, her own fake online dating persona was much more convincing. As she ethically avoided sending any money and relied on her hacker friend to keep the scammer on the line, the scammer never seemed to suspect she may be baiting him, instead of the other way around.