A retired East Bay businessman, still devastated by the loss of his wife, thought he found new love.
Instead, he was hooked by a cruel scam that took $1 million. His entire life savings is gone. Instead of a comfortable retirement in his quiet Brentwood neighborhood, he lost all of his savings — and now may lose his home, too.
Larry Sorenson returns home to an empty house each day, still grieving the loss of his wife of 35 years.
“Losing her was tough. It was tough,” he said. “I cried every day. It was real love. And, and, you know, I lost that.”
“Rhonda and I moved in on June 27, 2003…” he said.
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Larry and his wife, Rhonda, had barely finished building out their Brentwood home, adding a garden with swimming pool and bar, when she died of cancer last December.
“We sat at the bar. She drew out the plans for this,” he said, crying.
“So, after 35 years, you know, here I am in a 3,000 square-foot home alone. You go to bed at night, there’s nobody there. You wake up in the morning, nobody’s there,” he said.
Then amid his grief, life took an unthinkable turn.
“Yes, in July. Early July,” he said.
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A text from someone named Tina said: “Hi Caitlin I’m back from my trip to Napa Valley. Can you drop off my dog by tomorrow afternoon?”
Larry replied: “You have the wrong person here.”
Tina wrote back, “Aren’t you Caitlin? The owner of the LA pet store?”
Larry said, “No.”
Tina replied: “I’m so sorry maybe Caitlin gave me the wrong number… I hope I didn’t disturb you.”
“And then I just said no worries…” Larry said.
Then another reply: “Thank you, you are so kind… I am Tina from LA. Are you also a dog lover?”
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Larry texted back, “I like dogs… I don’t currently have one.”
“She started going on about, you seem like a nice guy, and it just led me in…” he said.
And the next day, more texts.
“She got up in the morning, she felt like the conversation was great the day before… she was excited. She wanted to talk to me again. So we started talking,” Larry said.
Tina told him she ran a small energy company. He said he was a retired roofing company owner. She said she invested in real estate, ranches, wineries and crypto. Larry was intrigued.
“You have drawn my interest!” he replied.
“I told her a little bit about my life. Losing my wife…” Larry told 7 On Your Side.
Tina suggested they talk over WhatsApp instead.
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“Because it’s encrypted. It’s safer… she talks to her real good friends on WhatsApp,” he explained.
“She said, ‘Would you send me a picture of yourself?'”
So they exchanged photos.
“And she, to me, is a good looking young lady. And then she explained her whole beginning of her life. You know, being adopted because she was abandoned by her mother as a child in Hong Kong,” Larry said.
“And you start feeling like, a little I guess you want to comfort her a little bit. And so it just kept growing and growing to where you started really having feelings for this person, really caring feelings,” he said.
They started chatting every day.
“I’d wake up in the morning and either she’d message me or I’d message her… with a little saying like, ‘Good morning sweetheart,'” he said.
Here Tina writes: “Good morning my friend, did you smile at yourself in the mirror this morning?”
He replied, “Just now getting out of bed…”
She said, “I’m going to the gym to exercise.”
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She texted a photo. Larry replied: “Very nice… You look great.”
Tina urged him to keep exercising, too. “I know that nothing is the same after losing a loved one…” she texted.
His interest grew: “We have a lot to learn about each other and I am excited… how can this stuff happen?”
She replied: “Sometimes the right people find each other through the smallest cracks in time… you made me believe I can find true friends on the internet.”
She told him what she would wear if they met.
“I am hooked!” he replied. “Can’t wait to meet you.”
After months of grieving, Larry thought he’d stumbled on new love.
“I got emotionally excited about it. I really did,” he said. “That first initial part of falling in love with someone is always so exciting. And she started showing emotions and caring about me and about what I did and who I was… it was very very uplifting.”
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They chatted about world travels, about their favorite wines… cars… books and music. She dropped hints of her lavish lifestyle in Encino. She was sipping “Leroy,” a $4,000 wine. She drove a Rolls-Royce Cullinan for business. And she earned millions of dollars from crypto investments with help from her aunt at Morgan-Stanley.
They shared their favorite song lyrics. He sent her a video of himself playing bass guitar to classic rock. “Hey Tina, this is Lynyrd Skynyrd…”
During the next three months, Larry declared his love over and over, saying, “You are so interesting, intelligent, caring, beautiful inside and out and I couldn’t help falling in love with you Tina.”
Yet she would never meet him in person. She demanded he keep their relationship a secret, saying one day they would meet. Maybe mid-October.
Larry wanted to look fit and young for the big day.
“This gal is supposedly 45 years old. I’m 71. I normally don’t act 71, but she had me where I was starting to cut back on my food, working out again…” he said. “I lost 30 pounds… I bought a new suit because the ones I have are kind of outdated.”
Little did he know it was all a trap.
She was not really Tina.
“Tina” was a crypto scam organization, out to get his $1 million.
Larry had developed real feelings for a fake person.
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For three months, he believed he could have a life with Tina.
Now Tina said she could make him rich.
“She was telling me how she had $10 million in her crypto account. She showed where she had traded $3 million and got $1 million. And it happens in like five minutes,” Larry explained.
Tina told him her aunt at Morgan-Stanley would tell them when to trade.
She guided him to wire money from his bank, to Coinbase, to Crypto.com.
“It was amazing in a short amount of time how quickly you actually made money,” Larry said.
They practiced with play money at first, then small amounts…
“She would show me on the screenshot which one to click and then you’d go through this process,” he said. “It looked like the money was coming in in large amounts… she kept trying to get me to put more money into this account because it could get like 50% return.”
So he tapped his $1 million IRA account. He put in $500,000 at first, then days later, another $500,000. It wiped out his retirement savings.
But it appeared his “invested” $1 million had grown to $2.4 million. Tina said to put in more.
“She wanted me to get… money out of my house, money from my kids, anywhere I could get it. Friends, relatives, to try to get me up to $3 million,” he said.
Larry didn’t have that kind of money. Banks turned him down for loans or lines of credit. So he asked his step daughter for money.
“I said, Megan, I said, ‘Here’s the deal, doing this.’ And I said, ‘You don’t have a couple hundred thousand dollars you’d be able to throw on this, if you knew you could make a profit off it, right?’ And she goes, ‘Larry, this is a scam.'”
Frantically, he and Megan tried to pull money out of the crypto account.
It wasn’t there.
“She started crying on the phone,” he said.
He’d just lost $1 million, all of his retirement. And worse, he may have to pay $400,000 in taxes for drawing the funds from his IRA account.
It means he may have to sell the house he built with his wife.
“My wife has been a part of it and I feel her here… so I didn’t want to sell it,” he said tearfully.
He contacted the FBI, the FTC, the Secret Service. No one could help.
It’s a crime so common it’s got an ugly nickname: “pig butchering.”
Fatten the pig, then slaughter it.
To this day, Tina is still trying to get Larry to put more money in his account.
“Good morning dear,” she writes.
“It’s not a good morning…” he replied.
“What I’ve done has completely, completely flipped my life upside-down. I end up with no house. I’m 71, 72 years old and can’t live in California,” he said.
Larry has all but given up on ever getting that money back. He told his terrifying story to alert other seniors and potential victims of the red flags he ignored: a wrong number that starts a relationship, never meeting the person in person, and investing in crypto with someone you only met online.
He says open your eyes no matter how romantic it seems… don’t get butchered.
Take a look at more stories and videos by 7 On Your Side.
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