Award-winning journalist Mariana van Zeller is getting a new nose. And new hair. And a full makeover. Not for a magazine spread, but because she’s about to go undercover for the strangest assignment of her career. She’s trying to intentionally get romance scammed.
In 2025 alone, romance scammers stole more than a billion dollars from American victims, and Mariana wants to know exactly how they do it.
Armed with a new identity and a freshly-built dating profile, she becomes the bait, setting off on a journey at times absurd and yet deeply human, in which she starts dating a four-star general deployed to Syria, gets wooed by “George Clooney,” and teams up with a hacker who helps her locate several scammers, including her own.
Along the way, she exposes the tactics, the technology, and the psychology that have made these scams not just common, but nearly inescapable.
