u/SailorGirl2089

I’m dealing with my MIL being in a scam. At first when the family found out about it we thought it was the typical oil rig engineer stuck at sea romance scam. A few months later we found out that her bf was sending her a safe and it was stuck at the Canadian customs office. All of a sudden my MIL finds a YouTube celebrity online that will give “blessings” he tells her she won a blessing and that he’ll get the box for her and as a bonus he’s giving her a new gmc truck. The catch was she had to pay traffifs for it to cross state lines, we tried to explain it to her and she wouldn’t listen so she ended up paying almost $3,000 to get her truck and BFs box. After dealing with these 2 scams I then find out she is talking to another YouTube celebrity that is known for giving “blessings” and she has been sending him money to help him take care of his family even though we’ve kept her up to date on the real persons videos and net worth. Now we’ve found out she is talking with 2 different “IRS” agents about paying taxes for one of the YouTube celebrities and the other is for things to do with the truck. For my peace of mind and my husbands we’ve been trying to figure out what kind of scam this is. We realize it’s all connected every story leads back to the BF which is why I’m wondering if this started off as a romance scam that lead into a pig butchering scam or is it a hybrid of the two? TIA

I’m the only one my MIL will talk to about her oil rig boyfriend. She just told me today that he was denied his retirement because he’s the only one qualified for his job since his boss was injured in a work accident and that now her boyfriend is required to stay until December. She did try to stop talking to him and deleted all of their messages but she said it was too hard to go without him for even a week. She talked to him about her kids telling her that she’s involved in a scam and that he could be Nigerian and he said he was very offended but still willing to give them a chance. The scammer has told her he’s been underwater for 6 months and hasn’t saw the sun in 6 months. She believes every word he says. We have looked up all of their details of how oil rigs actually work and watched all of the scammer videos and she believes the kids are lying. She even told her sisters that she didn’t know if she could go on a trip to see family because she hadn’t heard about the retirement decision yet. We know she has given all of her savings away and that she can’t even afford to live from pension check to the next because her account stays in the negative. She’s always having to go have meetings with the bank and we suspect it’s because her account is constantly in the negative. I’m the only one she will talk to about all of this because she thinks I believe her but everything I find out I tell the family so they can prepare for the inevitable. I tell all of this to ask if she’s too far gone in this “relationship” for us to even try to keep opening her eyes and showing her the truth or should we finally just let the cards fall where they may?

UPDATE!
Yesterday we had dinner with her and while we were there I had some time to find out some things out. She skipped paying her bills for May and made up for them this month. She gets her pension check on the 24th and as soon as she got it she took a little over half and gave it to the scammers. She believes they are going to get married when he comes back and that’s one reason why she’s so upset about his retirement. She also is being scammed by 2 internet celebrities. She has been sending them money too. One is supposed to give her a truck and the other is supposed to pay her back for everything she has given him while he’s had a hard time providing for his family. I just don’t see how we will ever be able to break this cycle.

We live in a small community where everybody grew up together and knows at least one person in every family. My MIL has been a victim of a romance scam for almost a year now. It seems like we never had issues with romance scams before or at least people didn’t talk about them. Now all of a sudden in the past couple of weeks we have had at least 4 women talk about their “boyfriends” and how they met them online and brag about how they’re working on an oil rig, in the army and even the Elon Musk romance scam. All of these women are at least 60 and older. One of them is married and is supposed to be meeting Elon today after leaving her husband of 57 years earlier this week. I say all of that to ask if anyone has noticed an increase in the number of local romance scam victims after someone becomes involved in one? Did my MIL open the door for there to be other victims? Do scammers get more victims in a community once they have started one there?