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Fake Love, Real Money: 15 True Stories of Online Romance Scams, Fake Identities, and Lost Fortunes
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 14 2026
Pages: 440
Weight: 1.29
Height: 0.89 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What if the person who says I love you is not trying to win your heart-but to gain access to your trust, your savings, and your future?
Romance scams rarely begin with a request for money.
They begin with attention.
A message. A compliment. A stranger who seems unusually interested in your life. Someone who remembers what you say, asks whether you have eaten, talks about the future, and slowly becomes part of your everyday routine.
Only later does the emergency appear.
A frozen bank account. A sick child. A military deployment. A business opportunity. A cryptocurrency investment that seems to be making extraordinary profits.
And by then, the person asking is no longer a stranger.
FAKE LOVE, REAL MONEY exposes the disturbing reality behind 15 true stories of online romance scams, fake identities, stolen photographs, financial manipulation, catfishing, and investment fraud.
These are not stories about foolish people making obvious mistakes. They are stories about how trust can be engineered-patiently, intelligently, and sometimes with terrifying sophistication.
Inside this book, you will encounter:
A fake American soldier promising to leave Syria and build a new life in Italy.
A successful-looking businessman whose romantic attention slowly turns into financial opportunity.
A woman who believes she is speaking to Brad Pitt-and loses hundreds of thousands of euros.
Victims guided into fraudulent cryptocurrency platforms where their money appears to grow while it is actually disappearing.
Stolen faces, fake doctors, false widowers, invented children, fabricated lawyers, manipulated photographs, synthetic evidence, and investment accounts designed to look completely real.
Some victims lose thousands.
Others lose retirement funds, homes, life savings-or nearly everything they spent decades building.
But the most unsettling part is not the amount of money.
It is how the scammers make the impossible feel reasonable.
John De Santi reconstructs these cases with a gripping true-crime approach that combines investigation, psychology, and human insight. Rather than blaming the victims, he reveals the mechanisms that make these scams so powerful: emotional mirroring, accelerated intimacy, future promises, manufactured emergencies, authority, social proof, sunk costs, isolation, fake verification, and the gradual transformation of love into financial trust.
This is not simply a book about scams.
It is a book about how human trust can be manipulated.
About why intelligence, education, professional success, and technological experience do not automatically make someone immune.
About how a relationship can become emotionally real even when the person at its center is not.
And about why the most dangerous question is often not:
How could someone believe this?
but:
How was the story constructed so well that believing it became possible?
If you read true crime because you want to understand not only what happened, but how and why it happened, this book will stay with you long after the final page.
Read FAKE LOVE, REAL MONEY today-and discover how easily a message can become a relationship, a relationship can become trust, and trust can become the most expensive mistake of a lifetime.
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