HOMOSASSA, Fla. — Eager to meet a country music star, a fan from Homosassa invested hundreds of dollars in what she thought was a ticket to a celebrity meet-and-greet. Unfortunately, she soon discovered she wasn’t the only victim of this scam.

Roxanne Santos was under the impression that she would meet Cooper Alan, a musician she admired. Her hopes were fueled by a message she received saying, “Hey sweetheart, it’s Cooper Alan,” accompanied by a photo of Alan holding a sign that read, “Roxanne, it’s Cooper Alan.”

These messages were sent via the private messaging app Zangi, filling Santos with excitement.

“The sign convinced me,” Santos explained. “When I saw, ‘Hi Roxanne, this is Cooper Alan,’ it pulled me in. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s Cooper Alan reaching out to me!’ At 67, receiving attention from a young man and as a fan, I was thrilled and eager to start a conversation.”

She started messaging back and forth and received a video that said, “Sweet Roxanne, how are you doing today? I really don’t have much to say right now. I just want to let you know that I love you so much and I care about you so much.”

Then, she says she started receiving messages asking for money, and the person told her to talk to his so-called management team.

“They first got me — I had to pay for FedEx to get my ticket delivered to me. I paid them $103 for a VIP ticket,” Santos said.

She paid for that VIP ticket through PayPal.

“They even sent me a copy of a VIP card with my name on it, and then all of a sudden, I kept pushing for the ticket…And they sent me back an email, a text saying that there had been a terrible accident — that the FedEx had been in a serious…in an accident. And I asked for a picture of it,” Santos said.

Santos and her husband later determined the photo was from a crash about a year prior. 

“They sent me a picture of a FedEx truck. When we got it, the wheels are all rusted. It looks like it’s from many moons ago. This couldn’t have happened a month ago. So my husband went online and found out that the vehicle had been abandoned in 2024. So there you go, that’s when we knew everything went downhill,” Santos said. 

The person messaging her for months was not Cooper Alan — but an imposter.

“Cooper Alan doesn’t need any money,” Santos said. “But they make you feel like it’s really him. He even sent me when his concerts were.”

She added, “The lies just to get easy money. And he did it so quickly in a two-month period. If I had have kept going, he would have got thousands out of me.”

Cooper Alan became popular because of his social media platforms, and now he’s turning to them to warn fans about fake accounts, saying in a TikTok video, “I will never ever ask anyone to give me money.”

We shared the video Santos received with Larry Hall, Associate Dean of Research at the Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing at the University of South Florida. He says there were some obvious signs the video was fake.

“I thought that if you were experienced in looking at fake videos — AI generated videos — there were some clues there,” Hall said. “Everything didn’t look normal size. It looked like little stretches in places like on the neck or on the hands, and so I would have said, ‘Hmm, I wonder if this is real.’”

He added some advice if you do receive any videos that you’re not sure about.

“I’d look very carefully at the videos, and if you can record it, do it, so you can look afterwards and anything that looks unusual, you might say, ‘Oh, it’s a weird camera angle, or just a glitch in the transfer of the information.’ But I’d be suspicious then if it doesn’t look exactly like I’d expect a person to look like,” Hall said.

Santos says she reported the messages to the Federal Trade Commission. 

“$200 isn’t a lot of money, sir. But if you’re getting more money from others — my goodness gracious, how many more in line? How many? And he knew how old I was. How many elderly are they getting out here too?” Santos questioned.

According to the FTC, the number of seniors reporting impersonation scams has soared over the last five years along with the amount of money they’ve lost. 

Cliff Steinhauer is the director of Information Security and Engagement at National Cybersecurity Alliance, and he says older Americans are targets.

“They’re more exploitable in terms of human social engineering. So, unfortunately, they make up a easy population of targets for bad guys to go after because they tend to be more trusting, and they may not be aware of today’s current scams and how they work,” Steinhauer said.

He adds they have money stashed for retirement, making them more vulnerable.

“Sometimes it preys on people’s loneliness or hope, or just famous people and celebrities are always a big one too,” Steinhauer said. “Today though, we’re seeing bad guys using AI and deep fake video tools to add a layer of believability to these scams.”

“It’s very draining,” Santos said. “It broke my heart. What I’ve done…I just need to fix me and get my life back to normal again because I made a big mistake.” 

The National Cybersecurity Alliance has “then and now” tips and a workbook that’s available online. It shows you, your parents or grandparents, how to spot scams, verify information and protect your privacy.

“At the National Cybersecurity Alliance, we’re really focused on keeping everyone safe online while we use online connected services, and so, we’ve developed a campaign and a tool kit for older adults that their kids or friends can use to help show them kind of some of these emerging threats — what they look like today versus what they used to look like. So it’s called the ‘Then and Now Campaign.’ So that back then you would have somebody selling fake watches or somebody going door to door, but today, it’s a direct message in your Instagram or it’s a phone call that sounds like your grandkids. So it’s a lot more complex, but we need to definitely let people know what it is, what it looks like and what to do if you encounter it,” Steinhauer said.

Steinhauer also stresses you can’t just use a password, you need to use two factor authentication to protect your accounts. 

Check out more of the interview below, so you can understand why you need that extra level of security on your accounts.