NBC Bay Area: How Online Romance Scams are Netting Millions of Dollars and Pushing Victims to Self-Harm

Norm Jones didn’t know where to turn.

What he thought was a whirlwind romance had fallen apart. The woman he had been talking with almost every day for five months wasn’t who she said she was. The $250,000 he had invested at her encouragement, his life savings and retirement, was gone. He would have to sell the house.

This wasn’t supposed to happen to him. Jones, 54, spent his career working in telecommunications and cybersecurity in the Silicon Valley area. Yet, he had fallen for an internet scam that experts say has grown more potent — and appears increasingly connected to self-harm.