Seems it happens everywhere!
A friendly neighbour (also in her 70s) just told my wife that her daughter had called her:
I've won a million Forint in the lottery on facebook!
Mother asked - what did you do?
Oh, I sent them my address, my account no, my Bankcardcode ...
Mother said:
Are you crazy? That's scam!
So the daughter (around 50 years) went to her local bank by bicycle - but too late.
150.000 HUF had already left her account. She can call herself lucky - 150.000 is the max for these transactions.
And then a friend of hers told a similar story - though her teenage daughter had warned her ...
Another 150.000 ...

These sort of scam are always making the rounds on the internet and the reason they do are many but for them to be succesful the victim must have let down their guard.
NEVER EVER give your banking details to ANYONE online that you did not initiate contact with. . If you get an email purporting to be from your bank asking for your details those are always scams as well.

I recently read that some scammers are now using AI so no doubt the numbers of scams and the craftiness of them will increase.

Jack, you're right of course.
I won't even give my address or phone numbers to someone on facebook (or X or ...) whom I don't know!
But some people ...

Oh jeez, I wouldn't fall for that kind of scam. Unfortunately, there's some very naive people who fall for this stuff.

There are of course the usual things.
One woman in the village got that call from her granddaughter - had an accident, need some money ...
A friend will come to your house ...
But the craziest was:
An Austrian acquaintance, married to a really nice Hungarian woman, lived near the Balaton with his wife. Both were in their 60s when he asked for divorce. Online he had met a very good looking American woman, about half his age, which said she really loves him.
She wanted to visit him and of course asked for money to pay the ticket.
And he waited for her at the airport in Budapest, of course she never arrived ...
PS:
We met them both (him and his former wife) so this is not just hearsay. She was really devastated died soon.

I have heard of that kind of thing.

I have a deaf friend, 64 years old, who has a Fillipino girlfriend who lives in Japan. He met her through a friend of his who also had a Fillipino girlfriend living in Japan. They are no longer together. My deaf friend is engaged to his Fillipino girlfriend. She wants to live in England. I am not sure how old she is but probably 55-60. She has two daughters and I think two grandchildren.
My deaf friend lives on a farm in a small village. I am not sure whether she will like living there. I think she will get bored. His family used to run a farm but now rent out the land. His mother is in a care home and his brother has a property on part of their land.
I'm actually surprised they have been together three or four years. He will have to financially support her. I have never met her. It should be her turn to visit him in UK. My deaf friend has met her family in Manila, Phillipines.
His financee has a flat in Manila and my deaf friend owns 50% of it after she had money troubles due to covid and he offered to help her out. I have no idea if he has any documents confirming he owns 50%.
I have a very long video chat with him about his fiancee and he trusts her completely.
I worry about what could happen to him in the future.

With mobile phones you can limit the effect of this kind of stuff by blocking calls from unknown numbers and only accepting numbers from your contacts list.
Don’t forget to run through your contact list too of course.

Do you live in Hungary?

There are list circulating on the dark web of email adresses and names that are typically collected (stolen) from websites that ask you to sign up for news or information. When I have to respond for an email address request like that I give them a throw away email address I have. I check it every few months for a laugh and sometimes it has dozens of obvious scam messages from widows wanting to help me out with my money problems with an offer to give me millions of Euro's to help them get a large sum of money (diamonds or other fake treasures (Non existent) out of the country they live in or other obvious scam plea for help. The spelling mistakes are often funny to read. I suspect a good many of these scams originate from 3rd world internet cafe's.

Late 2022 I received an email from someone attempting to blackmail me. The person stated if I did not pay via bitcoin they would release to all my contacts websites I had visited. I had to laugh and it took me several hours to get up off the floor because I just couldn't stop laughing!
Yes, I ignored the email. Not a single contact has emailed me to ask questions about websites I'd visited. 99% of websites I visit are Hungarian so unless the "blackmailer" is Hungarian they would not know what I'm looking at!
If anyone thinks the photo attached is pornographic you have a scew loose! I spent hours trying to find what you see.

I don't live in HU but these scams are widespread in the EU.

If I got a message like that from someone threating to share my internet activity I too would probably fall on the floor laughing. Anyone they would be sent my activity would laugh as well. My daily activity includes 2 or 3 daily visits to The Weather channel site for my area of Hungary. Jofogas, DailyNewsHungary, The website for the local newspaper and TV station in my hometown, The websites of the 4 mortuaries back home, British Expats, YouTube and my email provider. Not much to see here.

Anyone caught by a scam should immediately contact their bank and report the crime to the police. The bank will assist in changing passwords pins etc. and the police will (should) start to trace the criminals - along with the bank who should try to trace the funds.

The max of 150 000 quoted above is an individual amount set by the account holder. You can set the level for daily withdrawals and for daily card spends at anything with which you feel comfortable. If you don't have a level set then the scammers can clean out the account.

IMO the authorities could do a lot more to trace and recover stolen money. If enough effort was put into trace and recovery eventually scams would be almost too difficult to do. E.g if the financial authorities put in as much effort as the anti-virus industry then the losses would drop significantly.

Whilst a lot of the scams come from 3rd world internet cafes a determined effort by the authorities to put pressure in the local governments - by say - excluding them from international money transfers (like Russia has been excluded from the SWIFT system) then much could be done.

And of course a big education campaign would also help - after all scamming is a multi billion untaxed industry, IMO authorities do have a liability.

Many of the scams originated in Nigeria. When I lived in South Africa some 30 years ago, it was common knowledge.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-49759392

There are also a great number of scammers running computer virus and tech support scams that originate in India and Pakistan. It does not seem like the Indian and Pakistan authorities are keen and prosecuting these type scammers. There is an excellent You Tube channel that goes after these tech support scammers. He tries to expose these scammers and shut them down sometimes he has been able to help some victims get back money.

Youtube links not working right let me try one more.