Keanu Reeves secretly wants to be your lover? Don’t get your hopes up, ladies, especially if he asks you for money
- Scammers are impersonating Hollywood star and multimillionaire Keanu Reeves to cheat money out of lonely and gullible older women
- More than US$304 million was lost to romance scams last year in the US, a 50 per cent increase over 2019; it’s a problem elsewhere too, including Hong Kong
Spoiler alert: if Keanu Reeves reaches out to you on social media and declares his romantic intentions, it’s probably not really him.
Nevertheless, women around the world have reported being conned out of cash and personal information by scammers purporting to be the John Wick actor.
A Google search for “Keanu Reeves scam” shows that women in Canada, Taiwan and across America have reported being duped into thinking Reeves has the hots for them – and that the multimillionaire movie star could use some money.
This is just one of numerous rackets that have become more common during the pandemic. According to the US Federal Trade Commission, American consumers have reported losing more than US$545 million to fraud since January 2020.
So-called impostor scams were the most frequently reported ruses in 2020, the FTC says. The number of impostor scam reports hit nearly 557,000 in the first half of this year, up 18 per cent from the same period a year ago. In Hong Kong, romance scams nearly doubled from a year earlier in the first half of 2021, with victims’ losses up 1.6-fold, to more than US$37 million.