Woman lost life savings to romance fraudsters who pretended to be Keanu Reeves

SAN DIEGO (WKRC) – A 67-year-old woman warned the public about a romance fraud that took her life savings: scammers pretending to be Keanu Reeves.

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67-year-old Katherine Goodson lost her husband in 2007 and told NBC San Diego she’s been struggling with loneliness since.

She moved to San Diego in 2022 and soon received a text message from someone posing as A-list Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves, known for performances in “The Matrix,” “Point Break,” and “John Wick,” among others.

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After some chatting, the fraudster asked Goodson to send him a $500 gift card to prove that she wasn’t just talking to him for his money.

“I did send it, but I said, ‘I want to hear your voice,’ and once I heard his voice I said, ‘You’re not him,’ and I blocked him,” Goodson told NBC San Diego.

Goodson spread her story online to warn others against the potential scam, but another ne’er-do-well swooped in and attempted to further take advantage of her.

Another person texted her claiming that he was the real Keanu reeves and that he felt bad that she had been scammed by someone pretending to be him. He quickly moved into more romantic texts.

“He wanted to marry me,” Goodson said. “I was lonely.”

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Over the course of two years Goodson talked to the Keanu Reeves impostor and a series of other phone numbers that claimed to be the actor’s management team.

Once Goodson was out of money and couldn’t send anything else to the scammers, they became hostile, and that’s when she realized she’d been tricked.

“It was just a mess,” she said. “It was mind-boggling to the point that I didn’t know my head from anything.”

“There is nothing that hasn’t already been done to make me feel any worse,” she said.

The scam took nearly everything from Goodson, who was forced to live in her car after the ordeal. She brought her story to the internet to try to warn others against falling for the fraudster’s tricks.