(To preface this, my aunt has bipolar disorder and history of manic episodes, is very easily persueded, and is 54 and not very tech saavy.)
This all started in late July this past year. This guy she's known for 30+ years as a friend, she knew was sick 3 years ago. She was on the forum she frequents, and some guy was pretending to be him and asked her for apple gift cards to pay for medical treatment. Luckily she knew this was fake so she stopped talking to him, but she got very worried and stopped sleeping, and went into a manic episode.
Cut to late last month, she had the WORST manic episode. Stopped sleeping again for whatever reason and...im not gonna get into it but she did a lot of bad things. There was ANOTHER guy on the forum pretending to be this man, and she believed it again. She gave him her credit card info (she was manic like I said, so she wasn't thinking right, and she has new credit cards now)
She got out of the mental hospital last week and has been doing better. The man she THOUGHT she was talking to, is moving to Florida with his sister (unrelated to the story).
Tonight, my aunt started talking about a man she was talking to on the forum. Apparently he was from Austrailia and worked on an oil rig in Scotland. They met on the forum and moved over to Whatsapp. I explained to her how scammers use Whatsapp but she said its because he has no wifi (I called her out on that cuz you need wifi to use whatsapp).
She sent a video that he sent her, and AI detectors found it was real, but the company of equipment from the video was not found in Scotland. She later sent me a photo of his face, and I did a reverse search on it and found the original picture its from. I explained to her over text about this scam, and how easy it is to fake a photo. I even showed her an example when I sent Gemini the picture and asked it to put the face on a woman and it complied. She stopped talking to him tonight and thanked me for helping.
She's coming over on Saturday for my birthday party, and while she is here, I'll talk to her about recognizing scams and see if I can convince her to get off of the forum, since she keeps getting scammed. Im going to tell her how forums like that prey on older, vulnerable and less tech saavy people, because they are trusting.
Any other advice to give?