How a Hacker Helped Mariana van Zeller Find Her Romance Scammer

I’ve been going to RSAC and Black Hat conferences for something like 15 or 20 years, but I’ve never once stuck around for DEF CON. After watching Super Scam Me, the new National Geographic documentary from Mariana van Zeller, I’m starting to think I’ve been leaving Vegas too early.

Mariana met Arman the Cyber at DEF CON while she was looking for help turning the tables on the scammers she’d been baiting. Arman told me she walked up and asked if he was a hacker. He said he could hack just about anything off of her, and within a couple of seconds he had the credit card number from the card in her pocket.

Getting Scammed on Purpose

In the film, Mariana goes undercover hoping to get romance scammed. With a prosthetic nose and a new identity as “Mary Zell,” a lonely divorcee in Phoenix, she puts herself out there as bait. The Federal Trade Commission cites nearly $1.5 billion stolen from Americans by romance scammers in 2025.

It doesn’t take long for a “four-star general” named Mark Turner, supposedly deployed in Syria, to start love bombing her, and she gets a video message from someone claiming to be George Clooney. She also meets Leslie, who has been talking to “Jon Bon Jovi” since February and has sent him so much money that she’s facing foreclosure.

The trap was set, but the next steps were challenging. Nat Geo imposed a strict rule against sending the scammers any real money, which is a problem when money is the whole point, and that’s where Arman came in.

A Fake Exchange That Passed the Smell Test

Arman built a fake cryptocurrency exchange, along with a receipt that looks just like what a Bitcoin ATM prints out. The victim sends the scammer a photo of the receipt, and when the scammer goes to the website to redeem it, the site won’t let them finish unless they allow it to see their location.

He owned and ran a crypto ATM years ago, so he knew what it takes to convince someone a transaction is real. He used an older domain so it wouldn’t look brand new, and he set up backlinks from other sites so Google would treat it as legitimate. If you called the support number, you got Arman.

“Every chain and trail that a legitimate website would do, we just tried to mimic it,” he told me.

“Mark” tries to redeem his fake Bitcoin four times in the film. Arman told me they tracked roughly 20 other scammers who didn’t make the final cut, and every one of them fell for it.

Tracking GPS Instead of IP Addresses

Attribution has always been one of the harder problems in cybersecurity, so I asked the obvious question about how sure he was that the location returned is accurate. Couldn’t the scammers just use a VPN?

Arman said about 90 percent of them did, which is why he didn’t bother with IP addresses and had the site ask the browser or phone for its GPS location instead. An IP address is a little like a postmark that tells you which city a letter passed through, while GPS gives you the return address. Leslie’s “Bon Jovi” pings to a specific house in Nigeria, and Mark’s multiple pings land within centimeters of each other as he moves around a home in Accra, Ghana.

Why People Fall for Romance Scams

The documentary shows deepfake videos of George Clooney and Jon Bon Jovi and cites them as evidence of how hard it is to detect that it isn’t real. I get that my ability to discern a fake and idenifty the “uncanny valley” effects may be better than most, but I didn’t find the videos all that convincing. Arman pointed out that the footage is more than a year old, and he’d bet the scammers have already moved on to better tools.

Deepfakes aside, what are the odds Jon Bon Jovi is sliding into your DMs? He’s been married to his high school sweetheart for decades. Also, Jon Bon Jovi has a reported net worth of nearly half a billion dollars, so why is he asking you to send him money? Arman agreed and said that goes for pretty much any celebrity. “If your gut is telling you something, you know it’s wrong,” he said.

Of course, the scammers put a lot of effort into overriding that instinct, whether it’s a made-up emergency or a “manager” selling a meet-and-greet, and Arman said people eventually just get overwhelmed. When I suggested they probably pay a little back to some victims to keep them on the hook, he agreed right away. “It’s a business,” he told me. The woman Mariana tracks down here in the Houston area had been talking to her scammer for three years, lost more than $100,000, and had been moving money for him as a mule.

When I spoke with Mariana in 2020 about Trafficked, she told me the world is a lot more gray than we’d like to believe, and she hoped viewers would bring more empathy than judgment. Near the end of Super Scam Me, she talks about the loneliness epidemic and how much a good morning text full of smiley emojis means to someone who’s isolated, which is exactly what scammers exploit.

Arman thinks better identity verification online would help, and maybe it would, but I don’t think any tool can talk someone out of something they badly want to be true. Someone can get away with the broken webcam excuse once, but if there’s a new reason every week why they can’t video chat, you should run.

Super Scam Me premieres Saturday, October 17 at 9 p.m. ET on National Geographic and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu. Watch it, and then check in on the people in your life who live alone. As Mariana says in the film, if you aren’t paying attention to them, somebody else out there is.