r/nottheonion • u/awesome_mccoolname • 18h ago
Woman who warned social media not to fall for Keanu Reeves romance scam becomes homeless after falling for Keanu Reeves romance scam
https://www.latintimes.com/keanu-reeves-romance-scame-victim-homeless-57025610.2k
u/beebs44 18h ago
She ended up sending Bitcoin, gift cards and wire transfers to the imposter over a period of two years, believing she was helping Reeves with supposed financial issues.
Keanu Reeves' net worth in 2024 is estimated at $380 million.
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u/Corka 17h ago
Even if they are extremely gullible I honestly don't know how someone can't become at least a little suspicious when they are asked to send cash over in strange ways like itune gift cards.
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u/Certain-Catch925 16h ago
They keep time pressure on and depends on the scam, some will involve begging them to help so the scammer doesn't lose their fake job while others will trick people with looser morals into thinking they're part of a bigger scam.
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u/deadsoulinside 16h ago
What's worse is that people have been convinced for things like paying off the IRS... like WTF rational human being thinks that the IRS wants giftcards to settle what they are owed.
Heck it's so bad that cashiers at stores get trained to recognize these scams to help intervene in case someone is getting scammed.
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u/Darmok47 14h ago
I was in charge of the office pool for gifts for the admin staff last Christmas and I actually had trouble buying large amounts of gift cards for our gift baskets because my bank wouldn't let me buy that much in gift cards. And cashiers double checked with me that I wasn't being scammed.
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u/Ancient-University89 11h ago
A couple of years ago, I decided to buy a new phone on Amazon. My family had gifted me some money for it, and the timing was perfect—the phone I wanted was on sale for a couple of days. But then my bank swooped in to ruin everything, letting me know it’d take over a week to process the deposit. Missing the sale and paying a couple hundred more? Not an option.
So, I came up with a workaround: Amazon gift cards. Found a store, did some quick math, and headed out to buy around $1,000 worth. I even joked to my fiancée, “This is going to look exactly like a scam. Wish me luck.”
Sure enough, the cashier was absolutely convinced I was being scammed. She asked questions, gave me the whole spiel about gift card fraud, and I could see she was really just trying to look out for me. I explained the bank delay, the Amazon sale, and even pulled up the product page on my phone to prove I wasn’t buying non-existent tech from some “Nigerian Prince Electronics” store.
Even after all that, they made me sign a waiver acknowledging I knew the risks and wouldn’t hold Shoppers Drug Mart liable if things went south. It felt a little over the top, but hey, I appreciated the effort.
In the end, everything worked out. I got the gift cards, snagged the phone at the sale price, and I’m writing this comment on that same phone right now.
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u/Unable_Traffic4861 15h ago
Is it really so hard to believe that Keanu Reeves would need that $50 target gift card to get himself back on his feet and pay her back a hundredfold?
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u/beklog 18h ago
some people are just gullible
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u/Stinky_WhizzleTeats 17h ago edited 17h ago
Amazes me how easy some people are to scam but I swear if I try to scam, somebody God would make a fucking example out of me immediately
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u/Novat1993 17h ago
You're inexperienced, so you would naturally try to make your scam believable. The correct way to scam someone is to make the premise of the scam unbelievable and stupid. So that only gullible people take the bait. Then when you are confident you got a gullible person on the hook, you actually start the illegal things.
The trick is to go for no one in particular.
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u/Zenmedic 17h ago
Cast a wide enough net and something will get caught.
Internet communications have made it so, so easy to mass spam thousands of people at a time, even if 99.99% of the population thinks you're an idiot, that .01% will still make you money.
Although I will say, some scams have started getting lazy. I'm amazed how many group chats I've been added to that are scam related. And even more amazed how many people don't actually realize it.
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u/Present-Secretary722 16h ago
I keep getting this one text about a package I have waiting with Canada Post, 1 I haven’t ordered anything in a long time and 2 the most recent time they did it Canada Post was on fucking strike, also if I order anything I have delivery updates go through my email, never text
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u/husky_whisperer 16h ago
I get the same types of text messages from scammers pretending to be the USPS.
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u/sloopieone 15h ago
USPS and I are planning to get married. I just had to send a Google Play gift card first to prove that I'm not into USPS for their money.
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u/ForfeitFPV 16h ago
Had one of those chuckle fucks throw one at me but they didn't BCC the other people and made it a group chat instead. Got to point out and hopefully save someone in real time that it was a scam
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u/ButterflyHumble5846 14h ago
Never point it out in the group text again. My service provider blocked my phone for a bit because I did the same, and they stole my number
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u/Present-Secretary722 16h ago
I wonder if it’s the same scammer(or group or whatever). I’ve also gotten so many I’m starting to get curious about what it looks like if I follow the link they provide, I’m wondering if it’s a fake Canada Post looking site or if they just made the laziest page ever
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u/zaknafien1900 16h ago
Yup or i spent a load of money on my visa .... I don't have a visa lol
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u/Present-Secretary722 16h ago
I’ve not gotten any of those yet, I have gotten one from “Amazon” saying thousands of dollars was spent on my account, hadn’t touched Amazon in I don’t know how long at the time and again, Amazon updates go through my email, never text. Also absolutely zero alerts from my bank or Amazon about money being spent.
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u/rnilbog 16h ago edited 16h ago
About 15 years ago, I made a Facebook account that claimed to be John Fogerty for the purposes of shitposting in some random group. I randomly checked the account a couple years later, and I had middle aged women DMing me saying how much they loved my music and stuff. Literally just the name John Fogerty and a low-quality picture of him I found on Google. I wasn't even trying to convince anyone I was him, and they still believed I was. It's insane how dumb some people can be.
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u/Automatic-Insect-457 13h ago
In the UK we have a TV Doctor called Dr Christian Jessen. About 15 years ago, some people I knew set up a page called ‘Dr Christian Jessen’s Shit Maccies Hair Do’ on Facebook that only had extremely crudely made Microsoft paint drawings of a mock comic strip where Dr Christian Jessen was in an abusive relationship with a drug addicted and down trodden Ronald McDonald. People still messaged the page begging for medical advice on several occasions. Utterly bizarre.
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u/Reuniclus_exe 15h ago
I work at a bank and once had a long, extensive conversation explaining to a man that no- Justin Trudeau did not send you a $9000 check, and that it is odd that he's asking for $4000 back.
I thought he understood, but the next day he came back and still wanted to deposit it - just in case
Can't help everyone
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u/TheForeverKing 13h ago
I always loved the example of someone scamming people about sport results. You get 1024 addresses and send a prediction for a soccer match yet to be played to all those addresses. To 512 you send that A will win the match, and to the other 512 you will send that B will win the match. After the match you forget about the group that you predicted wrong, and you pull the same stunt about another upcoming match, again dividing the remaining people into two groups. rinse and repeat until you're left with a small group, but who all believe you have miraculously predicted the outcome of an upcoming match successfully for 4-5 times in a row. Then for the next time you send them a message that says they'll need to pay up if they want another prediction.
To me it's such a perfect story to explain the dangers of how scams can make you believe something which is obviously bullshit, but when you're experiencing it without all the information, it sounds appealing.8
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u/brutinator 15h ago
The other reason this works is that if its ridiculous enough, the person youre scamming will actively refuse to beleive they are being scammed, because that would mean they were stupid enough to fall for it. That shame also means that they wont tell anyone until way, way too late, so they wont be able to receive any help from a potential support network.
For too many people, if they have the choice of believing that they are wrong, or that a far fetched scenario is actually true, will double down on the fantasy 9/10 times instead of confronting thier own actions.
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u/RogueStatesman 14h ago
Yeah, the r/scams sub is a litany of stories of lovesick old ladies who sent "Liam Neeson" gas money for his helicopter.
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u/Content_Audience690 16h ago
I've thought if I ever did it, I'd just literally market it as a gullibility test.
Send this much money to take the test to see how gullible you are.
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u/J_Kingsley 15h ago
It's not that difficult to believe.
Theyre usually emotionally vulnerable, and very, very lonely.
Offer some hope and love, and so many would fall for it.
Which makes it extra sad and scammers extra disgusting
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u/cwfutureboy 12h ago
This is how cults, mainstream religions, MLM scams, self-help gurus, etc. work.
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u/Ainsley-Sorsby 15h ago
I think they key thing to understand is that some people want to be scammed, in a way, not because they're dumb, but they don't care as long as the scam make them feel good emotionally. Deep down they know, but as long as they get some sort of emotional fulfillment out of it, they carry on. The need for emotional fulfillment some times overrides every other sense
A succesful scammer is all about finding the right target, and people like the above, who are emotionally vulnerable or in some kind of emotional need, are ideal targets.
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u/erovaris 16h ago
An Italian volleyball player was scammed into believing he was in a relationship for 15 years with a woman using photographs of Victoria's Secret model Alessandra Ambrosio.
https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/2021/11/27/61a278d922601d0a288b45a5.html
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u/GamiNami 15h ago
15 years in a 'relationship', and never met 'her'. I now worry about this guy...
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u/Darmok47 14h ago
My favorite was the 60 something year old physicist who got scammed into smuggling cocaine for a cartel in South America because he thought he was meeting a 20 something Czech bikini model he had been corresponding with online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Frampton
Before his jail sentence, he might have been on a shortlist for a Nobel Prize lol.
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u/bfodder 15h ago
This goes beyond just gullible. She fell for it twice and ended up homeless. That is plain fucking stupid.
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u/capfedhill 16h ago
some people are just
gulliblelonely.Well, gullible too of course. But I think loneliness is the driving factor.
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u/Oculus_Mirror 14h ago
I also think cognitive decline is a major factor in these scams, it's so often elderly people falling for them. Combo of gullibility, loneliness, and beginning stages of cognitive decline make for an extremely vulnerable person.
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u/disposableaccount848 16h ago
Nah, some people are just straight up dumb as hell. There just isn't another explanation.
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u/No-Analysis-3094 15h ago
Basically 10 years before showing any other symptoms people who will end up being diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimers start making poor financial decisions/falling for scams. As the disease progresses they become more and more likely to be late with paying bills or sending all their money to Internet Keanu.
But yes, some of them are just morons. For others it's the first symptom of cognitive decline.
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u/jp_jellyroll 16h ago
For real. There are thousands of people out there who vehemently believe the Earth is flat.
That ain’t loneliness. They’re just very stupid.
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u/Dickcummer42069 16h ago
I knew a guy who was raised in a southern fundamentalist Christian community. He is a very smart guy but he had a real serious issue with gullibility.
He would repeat stuff to me he heard that made no sense and he had never questioned it, and there were times I told him things that didn't seem hard to believe and he had a tough time believing it.
He once called me crying after being scammed by a fake gambling website (he doesn't even gamble) and I really and truly couldn't believe how deep in he was.
I think when you see cases like this where the person was going back over and over and giving them more money when it's very obvious, that's not just somebody who is stupid. They might be stupid, but there's definitely more than that going on.
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u/LaurenMille 14h ago
I mean... That's still stupidity, no?
They might have classroom intelligence, but they're severely lacking in emotional and social intelligence.
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u/leetfists 13h ago
In what way was he smart again? Sounds to me like he's dumb as hell.
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u/gospdrcr000 17h ago
My mom got her 401k scammed THROUGH FUCKING GIFT CARDS ... lemme say it louder for the people in the back, GIFT CARDS. It's infuriating
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u/RaymondBeaumont 16h ago
so she didn't get to hear NOOOOO WHAT ARE YOU DOING DON'T CLAIM DEMMMMM
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u/ScreamingCryingAnus 16h ago
DO NOT REDEEM! MADAM!
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u/AtlasFlynn 16h ago
WHY DID YOU REDEEEEEEEM
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u/Certain-Catch925 16h ago
If my parents start talking about buying gift cards or sending money to help import gold, I'm giving them one chance for me to explain, and if that doesn't make them see reason I'm just going to join in on scamming them.
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u/Dr_Biggus_Dickus_FBI 15h ago
I’m gonna start scamming my dad and taking all the scam money and put it in a separate account and when he finally is like “Muh Moneyyyyy!!”
I’ll be like “I did it, idiot, now here’s your weekly iTunes allowance.”
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u/Mistress_of_the_Arts 16h ago
Honestly, after what I went through with my mom, this is the way to do it.
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u/draconianfruitbat 16h ago
Yikes, I’m so sorry. Would someone mind saying just a little more about how?
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u/gospdrcr000 16h ago
Well to be fair my mom's not the brightest crayon in the box, she even went as far as to load some gift cards, got the inkling it was a scam and then put the loaded gift cards back on the shelf
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u/Now_Wait-4-Last_Year 16h ago
wait
what
really?
I don't know anymore
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u/gospdrcr000 16h ago
Dude, I wish I had the answers, she was able to recover those few cards thankfully. My guess is early onset alcohol dementia
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u/draconianfruitbat 15h ago
I’m even sorrier that’s what’s (been) going on. Wishing the best for you and your family.
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u/DDmega_doodoo 15h ago
The details may differ but the scam is basically the same
Scammer spam emails saying you have been charged several hundred dollars for some software or service
When you call to cancel it, they offer a "refund"
They direct you to fill out a bullshit form and then claim you made a mistake filling it out, eg. you put $4,000 instead of $400, so they sent you too much money, and you must now repay them
From there, either it's physically mailing cash, crypto, direct wire transfer, or gift cards
No, none of it makes sense, but they largely prey on the elderly who are either extremely tech illiterate or senile
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u/SuspiciousMention108 16h ago
Why are people so stupid? If I’m online “dating” Keanu Reeves, he better be sending me tons of gifts and money.
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u/dimechimes 16h ago
My buddy has a small business. His receptionist is a woman in her 60s who's been married forever. She started cheating on her husband w blind tinder dates. She brags about it. He said she's fallen for scams multiple times and lost thousands of dollars to obvious scams. It's like a switch got flipped in her brain and she says yes to anything for even the smallest bit of attention.
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u/Horse_Renoir 16h ago
You should probably advise your buddy that when she runs out of her money it's going to be the business's money she sending out next.
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u/SouthFromGranada 15h ago
It's like a switch got flipped in her brain and she says yes to anything for even the smallest bit of attention.
I do wonder if there's some early stages of dementia at play in a lot of these kinds of cases.
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u/---------II--------- 15h ago
Likewise. The combination of disinhibition, poor judgment, weird gullibility, and strange, inappropriate behavior (discussing, in a professional setting, Tinder escapades in this kind of detail) screams "cognitive/neurological issues."
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u/No-Analysis-3094 15h ago
Seems like it very much is - New York Times Article About It. This is a gift link so it shouldn't be pay walled
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u/bookcupcakes 15h ago
They use their wealth to confuse those that don’t have it. They claim all the money is handled by managers and is locked up in assets. To someone who has none of those things, it sounds plausible. Sometimes they do send small gifts to play the part. A fake Keanu sent my mother train tickets.
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u/h1a4_c0wb0y 16h ago
I'm having financial troubles and I can't get anyone to send me money 🤦♀️
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u/my_spidey_sense 16h ago edited 16h ago
That’s because you need to be loaded already.
I don’t give to poor people because you shouldn’t reward failure, but I send $2,000 every Christmas to Kira Kardashian to make sure she remains a billionaire
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u/llama-friends 15h ago
What’s saddest is Keanu would be more likely to give money to a homeless person than to ever ask for it.
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u/LastPlaceStar 18h ago
I'm sure the real Keanu Reeves will see this story and help her. After she sends him some Google Play cards so he can pay for an uber to visit her with a huge bag of money.
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u/SystemDeveloper 18h ago
He just needs 1 more wire transfer and he's back on his feet!
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u/lepobz 17h ago
As stupid and gullible as they are, you can’t put all the blame on the victims. There’s a special place in hell for scammers.
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u/mint420 16h ago
Of course the scammers are trash, and I won't say that I don't feel any sympathy for the victims, but the victims are still incredibly dumb. There are scams out there that work even on decently intelligent people, but the "Keanu Reeves romance scam" is not one of them.
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u/Rakkuuuu 14h ago
They're mentally ill. My cousin has a learning disability and is constantly falling for bots appearing as women. Some people are not supposed to use money or technology unsupervised.
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u/idledebonair 13h ago
This is kind of a weird take but I really disagree with the notion that obtuse people deserve poor outcomes.
I think that people of lower intelligence actually deserve the most sympathy and help
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u/JohnHwagi 16h ago
Also, the main targets of these scams are elderly people with disabilities who may not be able to reason through things very well.
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u/Major_Pomegranate 16h ago
Plot twist, it was actually Keanu scamming her. Dude's begun his evil Keanu stage
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u/wutsupwidya 18h ago
“I was lonely” is the most depressing line in that story
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u/sylbug 17h ago
It's the driving force behind these scams. the vast majority who fall for them know on some level they're being scammed - I mean, come on, this shit is not subtle. But, if they give up the game then the attention stops, and for someone profoundly lonely that's a powerful motivator.
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u/Southernguy9763 16h ago
You are correct, it's not subtle.
In fact, scams are designed to be as obvious as possible. They want to weed out anyone who will figure it out and just waste their time.
If you fall for it, you're most likely going to give them what they want
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u/_WeSellBlankets_ 15h ago edited 14h ago
I was part of these scams around 2005. I worked for an IP relay company that provided phone services for the deaf. Foreign scammers would use it because you just needed an internet connection to access it, and it was a way to speak to Americans and not have them hear your accent. Us operators could recognize fraud instantly, but there are strict regulations about being neutral and not becoming part of the conversation and influencing it. It's to protect the deaf people using it. We could legally shut the conversation down and warn the other person if it met certain criteria, but the scammers would learn the updated criteria over time and adapt. The love scams were the toughest. And the scammers were always so over the top affectionate and corny. It was cringy to read to the person being scammed. And then over the top desperate with some financial need to get through customs or something.
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u/Bear_faced 15h ago
Yeah, and this article gives an uncomfortable amount of information about her. The fact that she let them print her location, the fact that she's homeless, and a picture of her shows that she has zero self-preservation instincts beyond just being an easy mark.
I have a young, handsome, and broke male relative who lives near her. He even looks a little like Keanu in his 20's. Thankfully he's a good kid, but if he wasn't he could easily waste a weekend looking for her and try to take advantage of her delusional gullibility in some way.
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u/Jasonrj 9h ago
Plot twist: Temu Reeves originally targets her to scam her but then the two actually fall in love. She then scams him for everything he's worth. The reason she twice went public about these scams was to raise publicity so she could eventually snag a Keanu with some sympathy (and money).
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u/rossmosh85 18h ago
I'm always confused by this. Sign up for a dating app and set the age from 30-70 and she's going to get attention that doesn't require sending her life savings to some scammer.
She wasn't lonely. She wanted to date a rich, handsome, movie star and was delusional enough to believe it was an actual possibility.
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u/givebusterahand 17h ago
If she’s sending him money she’s gotta believe he isn’t rich
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u/cxavierc21 16h ago
The scammer had her send money to “prove” she wasn’t interested in KR’s money.
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u/Miamime 15h ago
That was the first one. The second one, the “real” Keanu, was supposedly having money problems.
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u/SoggyMcChicken 17h ago
Exactly this. The amount of people I see that got scammed for a few hundreds for Taylor Swift tickets on the hopes they would be real is astonishing. People will really turn a blind eye to things if they think they’re getting something “too good to be true”
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u/DontSleepAlwaysDream 17h ago
see, I once went along with something I was pretty sure was a scam and ended up with a free ticket to see Coldplay so I just can't trust reality anymore
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u/SmPolitic 17h ago
Click this link to get your free massive yacht! (Totally not rickroll)
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u/ReasonablyConfused 17h ago
I think there a a brain defect out there that is not really defined yet. It goes something like this:
Brain knows there is like a near zero chance that a rich famous person wants to date you. But you only are sending $500, so if it is only a 10% chance, it is still totally worth it.
Then sunk cost fallacy kicks in. Then fear of public shame kicks in, so you keep quiet.
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u/hovdeisfunny 16h ago
It's basically gambling
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u/Cuofeng 14h ago
It is JUST gambling.
Lotteries, or sports betting, or slot machines, or these "Nigerian Prince" scams in whatever new form they take, it's all the exact same thing.
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u/GiveMeBackMySoup 16h ago
It's the most prevalent brain defect if it is one. All these people are afraid it might be real and they are missing out on having all their dreams come true. They play along and eventually their hope becomes their reality, always some dollars away.
My dad is an extremely successful person and he fell for a scam in his 40s. My mother who was bright but not in street smart could see it was a scam. But if someone promises easy access to whatever will fix a problem you have, even smart hopeful people can get suckered in. Family and friends is the best defense but I've read enough Reddit stories to know even that isn't enough for someone really hoping something is real.
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u/EmptyBrain89 12h ago
They should make a catchy term for being afraid of missing out on something. like BAOMO.
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u/Meret123 17h ago
That's pretty shitty of Keanu Reaves, I thought he was a good guy.
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u/PushTheTrigger 16h ago
She realized it was a scam and blocked him. After posting a warning about it, another profile reached out to Goodson pretending to be Reeves.
They claimed they were attempting to console her about the previous scam attempt. The woman fell for it and eventually felt the two were in love.
There’s no helping some people.
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u/Ancient-University89 11h ago
I work in the trades and we get lots of very stupid ideas from the people who ordered the job. Stuff that will look awful no matter how it's done, stuff that will waste material or money because it'll have to be redone, etc. We refuse any safety issues, offer unheard advice, but otherwise nod and agree because you can't fix stupid, but you can charge for it.
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u/ItsRainingTrees 17h ago
Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.
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u/stefan_stuetze 15h ago
Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.
I desperately want to go back to a time when that was about the dumbest sentence I've heard from a POTUS.
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u/imflowrr 15h ago edited 9h ago
Holy shit I didn’t know about this kind of thing.
A few years ago my father in law joined Facebook. After a few months, we were at dinner one night and he says “you’ll never guess who I met on the local Facebook guns group. Keenu Reevees! From Speed!”
Apparently they had been talking for a few weeks casually. Just talking about work, guns, guys stuff lmaoooo
Edit: This was a local Facebook group where locals would buy raffle tickets to win guns in our 3,000 person central Texas town lol
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u/Cold-Drop8446 15h ago
The smartest thing I ever did was tell my mom that she cannot possibly annoy me if she wants help verifying something isn't a scam. She comes to me at least twice a week and they're almost always safe with the occasional questionable one, but I dont care.
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u/odiin1731 17h ago
Does anyone know how to get in touch with her? I, the REAL Keanu Reeves, want to make this right.
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u/RoughDoughCough 14h ago
I know her personally. Happy to connect you, but my Internet is about to run out for the month in 10 minutes. If you CashApp me $50 to reload, I can send you her info.
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u/radium_eye 18h ago
This kinda thing is why I think it is a bad idea to turn victims of obvious dumb shit into poster children for avoiding obvious dumb shit. They have already demonstrated susceptibility, effectively have the only fame they will have for being easily scammed, what could go wrong.
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u/Ugo777777 17h ago
Ha what a dolt. I've been helping Keanu for the last 3 years, so why would he need her help? Some people are just gullible.
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u/ThatGuyinNY 16h ago
She's just playing the long con, hoping to get the REAL Keanu to see her story and feel bad for her. He then reaches out to her to express his sympathies and she gets him to fall in love with her. PROFIT!
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u/Mennovh12 17h ago
Very sad for the victims of these crimes. The trash who prey on people's loneliness and our gullible nature to believe should face severe consequences for their actions. Sad how often and prevalent this type of scam is.
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u/Sdn61387 17h ago
The real Keanu Reeves would choose to be homeless rather than bothering people to send him money. That should have been the biggest red flag.
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u/CurlOfTheBurl11 16h ago
Turns out she was only warning people away from Keanu so she could keep him for herself.
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u/Chiggadup 17h ago edited 13h ago
Wait…she correctly identified it as a scam, then the scammer reached out to apologize and she then believed that it was actually Keanu?….
Some people just don’t love holding onto their own money.
Edit: Y’all, the second scammer was also pretending to be Keanu Reeves. I’m not shaming for falling for a scam, but it was another Keanu Reeves scam…same celebrity!
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u/XenosHg 16h ago
If you fall into a pit, crawl out, and make a statement that you fell into a pit, turns out that doesn't make you an expert at not falling into pits.
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u/bookcupcakes 15h ago
This is a standard tactic. I worked in tech support for a bit and the number of people who were scammed and then got called from “people who want to help you get a refund” only for them to also be scammers was unreal. It’s part of their game. They scam, pass the info to second call center who scams again pretending to be nice.
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u/Nodan_Turtle 15h ago
Scammers watch subreddits about scams and scam victims, and then message people who post there saying they can help them recover their money... and in the end, scam them instead.
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u/bookcupcakes 15h ago
My mom fell for this and currently has run away to LA to “be with him”. Nothing, not family, not cops, not the mental hospital she’s been in, can convince her this isn’t Keanu. They use AI to send fake videos.
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u/draconianfruitbat 16h ago
People’s poor ability to manage their own lives is really at odds with keeping them independent and safe from predators. It’s a terrible problem — people too crazy to live independently used to be institutionalized, but abuses were widespread so that’s an abandoned model. You can’t even always trust family members to take care of elders/disabled people and make decisions in their best interests. Hard to know what’s a better way.
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u/Stumper1231 16h ago
TIL people are using Keanu Reeves, the millionaire actor, to scam people by impersonating him and requesting money.
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u/ThatOtherOtherGuy3 16h ago
The sadder story is that a 67 woman is only a few thousand dollars away from being homeless.
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u/Firm-Occasion2092 15h ago
I just cannot. Even if Keanu Reeves showed up at my house and told me he loved me, I would be like haha very funny, can you sign some stuff for me? And then send him on his way.
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u/ZeakNato 15h ago
If the real Keanu Reeves needed money, he could walk to any TV station, knock on the door, they would say "Holy shit it's Keanu Reeves, what do you want?", he could say "put me on TV." They would say yes, no questions asked. He could put up a PayPal qr code and say into the camera. "I need money, please pay me." And people would. That's it.
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u/BernieTheDachshund 15h ago
Scammers pretend to be lots of celebrities. I saw a video where a married woman was in love with 'Chase Rice', a country music singer. Her husband reached out to Social Catfish and even at the bitter end, she refused to believe it was a scam. No amount of evidence would convince her. Hopefully her husband left.
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u/jonnyozo 11h ago
Hey marry its me Keanu Reeves , I’m out of country tracking down a dog killing drug cartel and don’t have access to my gold . Please send $1500 to @I’mtherealReeves42000 and when I come back, we’ll go to the beach together..
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u/TonyJadangus 8h ago
My grandmother has been scammed by Keanu Reeves multiple times. My dad and his brothers have tried everything. Even my brother has gotten involved. She just keeps going after him over and over and it's horrifically embarrassing and sad but also funny.
In the latest scam he claimed that he was injured in a car accident while on tour in Japan. Of course he couldn't let any of his inner circle know because it would be a media circus, so he needed $800 of target gift cards I assume to cover his medical expenses? Is there even target in Japan?
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u/Cream_Of_Drake 18h ago
Article: She was scammed once for $500 then warned people to not fall for the same scam on social media.
Another scammer reached out claiming to be Keanu Reeves stating they wanted to reconcile what the scammer did.
She sent an undisclosed amount of money in bitcoin, however is now potentially going to be homeless.
The last line of the article is rather sad where she says it was because she's lonely.