I think my dad is addicted to falling victim for the pig-butchering (w/ romance) scam

I think my dad is addicted to falling victim for the pig-butchering (w/ romance) scam, as in he literally knows it’s a scam, but he falls for a new one on an almost monthly basis.

I think that he’s both lonely, and in a disturbing way addicted to losing all his money, because he’s fumbled every dollar in his life and I believe he’s completely incapable of just building up some savings because it feels foreign to him to do so. It’s quite sad.

It’s always your typical 20-something girl from Hong Kong, Singapore, etc, and him being a man in his late 50s with an ego he just can’t resist every time. He’s also a sex addict with a thing for younger women.

Couple that with the fact that he’s been messing around with currency trading well before the whole social media/internet scamming age, it’s a match made in heaven.

It started with « this girl messaged the wrong number, but we just started talking anyway », and he goes on to say how she’s a millionaire, she’s into him, and how she’s flying across the planet to be with him. This was years ago, and I told him it’s BS and poked holes in all the info he gave me. He shortly after confirmed I was right, that she just wanted him to buy bitcoin.

Fast forward a couple years, and this has gone on repeatedly with probably dozens of « women ». The thing is, he’s flat broke, so idk if they’re just ripping him for whatever couple hundred he has at the time, or if they split when they find out he’s broke, or if he’s pretending he’s wealthy to drag out some sort of fantasy that some woman half is age is into him. He told me one time he sent over 5,000 texts to a girl only to discover she was scamming him. I find that to be not only a complete waste of time, but just downright pathetic.

Over the years, the stories have evolved to avoid me hurting his ego and challenging the authenticity of these « relationships ». Each time the story behind meeting her has evolved to be more believable – starting as the wrong number scam, or women he’s met in « trading chats », to bumble/tinder, to now claiming he’s met them personally and that they live in our city.

I try to wrap my mind behind the psychology of the whole thing, because it fascinates me that he’s gone from falling for this countless times, to now getting some sort of bizzare satisfaction of continuing these chats knowing it’s a scam. I assume in many cases he isn’t even talking to actual women, which makes it a whole other layer of pathetic that he’s living out a whole fantasy of a romance with these people.

Anyway, this was just mostly for me to vent here, after discovering this subreddit, and the script apparently used for this type of scam from those posts here. It saddens me to know that we’ll never be able to take the trip we’ve always talked about, or even go out to lunch because of his financial situation. And even sadder to know he will more than likely die a completely poor and lonely man.

If anybody in your life is starting to fall victim to this stuff, I urge you to show them this subreddit, and the specific posts that outline this type of scam, or whatever scam they’ve fallen into. There will always be idiots to keep these schemes alive (and develop new ones), but I hope that everyday a few extra scammers come up empty.