A woman was convinced she was chatting on Facebook with Pope Leo XIV and was sending him money for his projects – and she simply did not believe Bank of Valletta when it told her the ‘pope’ was a scammer.

Another man lost his life savings to a fictitious Canadian woman whom he chatted with for months, and after she took all his money, he went to look for her abroad, only to discover the address she gave him didn’t exist.

And another woman spent seven years and €170,000 trying to buy a dog that never even existed.

These are not plot lines from a film but real-life stories of Maltese people who have lost a lot of money to sophisticated online scams during the past months. Their stories are detailed in this episode of Times Talk.

The episode delves into a wave of increasingly sophisticated and insidious online scams that is sweeping across Europe, leaving a trail of financial and emotional devastation.