You’d like to think you’d never fall for a romance scam, until one day you find yourself a lonely octogenarian overwhelmed by the sliver of attention a stranger is paying you, and you’re willing to toss them your entire life savings just because they asked for it. It will be even more tempting to do so when that person is, say, Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner.

It appears that the concept of the romance scam is now leaving Earth, as an 80-year-old woman in Sapporo, Japan, recently fell for a scammer claiming to be an astronaut in distress, who needed money to get back to Earth.

Published by CBS News but reported by Agence France-Presse, according to police, the fraudster slid into her DMs in July and started wooing her, then informing her that he was, in his words, “in space on a spaceship” a

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