This is me and Keith Thompson and Priscilla Presley. Here's a picture I took of Stevie in her bathroom.

Liza Likens spent decades on the road, a backup singer for Linda Ronstad and Stevie Nicks.

Blue-gray eyes that change with the color.

Sing with her on the track Blue Denny. And not long ago, Liza was in love.

He was very sweet, very complementary, which is what I was used to.

The modern-day romance started with Facebook messages from a person who called himself Donald.

He wrote a message that he was getting ready to retire, and he was looking for someone to get married and be his partner.

He captured Liza's heart with his meditative pose and an oddly familiar face.

This is my husband, Gregory. I'll always love him. I always like men that look like my husband? It was the most horrible thing that's ever happened to me, to lose my husband. And my husband also apologized to me before he died. He said, You know, I haven't prepared you for the world. And I'm sorry, I apologize.

For the first time since losing Greg, she felt her heart skip.

Donald started calling me his queen, just showered me with compliments, and he would call me every day from Germany.

What started as a whirlwind fairytale, she says, became a crippling financial nightmare when Donald started asking her for money.

First, he needed it just to buy time on his cell phone. With all the talking we'd been doing on the phone, he had run out of time.

How much money did you actually end up sending?

$1,023,000.

Liza is far from alone. Every year, thousands of Americans say they're duped by false promises or fear tactics.

Sometimes it's believing too much in people. Sometimes it might be believing too little, and maybe it's also a little bit of arrogance. I sometimes see people who are overly self-confident. They say, Oh, I can't be tricked. So their guard is down, and they don't do their homework.

The actual experience exceeds our expectations. In recent years, stories like Billy McFarlane's Firefest.

Built as a luxury star-studded event.

Concertgoers stranded with little to eat and just tends to sleep. And a man now known as the Tinder Swindler, who allegedly posed as the son of a diamond mobile and conned a string of women out of millions.

I just hate that I did this.

From fishing scams coming from fraudulent email accounts to phone calls using a relative's name, even voice, and online dating apps using an unsuspecting person's photo. We've all heard the warnings, but how hard could it be to spot the fake?

I say just take it with a grain of salt and don't trust everything that you see on the Internet. Things I wish I knew, cyber security edition.

Online, Kaitlyn Sarian goes by cyber security girl.

Hi, I'm Kaitlyn. I'm a cyber security and data protection expert, and I want to help you understand what a VPN is all about.

Let's go. She's been bringing Getting her expertise straight to Gen Z, posting easy to follow instructions on how to secure your most precious information.

Your name, address, phone number, and date of birth are all online for everyone to see. Here's how you can believe them.

So what's one of the first lines of defense when it comes to hackers? She says, unique passwords.

What happens is when your passwords are leaked on the dark web, your email and your passwords are tied together, and all they have to do is use this algorithm, and it basically adds and makes 10,000 different variations of the same base password. So what we like to say is use a passphrase, which is basically seven to eight random words strung together, and something that you're going to remember.

For nearly two and a half years, Liza says Donald love bombed her with words of affirmation, promising never to betray her. How about your friends, your support system? Are you telling them about Donald?

I told a couple of people. He didn't want me to tell anyone. To anybody that is watching it, that is a red flag. When they don't want you to tell anybody, there's something very wrong with that.

Love bombing really infiltrates a person and provides them with just a feeling of acceptance, of feeling loved, of feeling so important, and giving somebody something that they've always wanted or needed, and you're willing to do anything and everything.

Tell me about this photo.

This one.

At one point, Donald told Liza to him $250,000 in bail money because he got arrested while transporting a safe he says was filled with $700 million in gold and cash.

This is the one that when he told me they had taken him to prison in Spain, and he said this was taken from the prison on a break, and it's him holding a Post-it, and one of his nicknames for me was Lulu.

You had no doubts about this photo?

No. I thought it was real.

How about the sticky? Any thoughts about the Post-it? The Post-it? The handwriting?

Well, at first, no. But later on, when I went back, I went and I found this typeset.

It's a font.

It's a font. At first, I didn't realize that. And I said to him, My gosh, you have such perfect printing. But then later on, when I studied it, I realized that it was a font and that he had photoshopped it on there. I don't know how he got the Post-it in his fingers. Maybe they're not his fingers.

Were you in love with this guy?

Yes, I was. I did fall in love with him. I did.

Or is $700 million enough to keep you going?

No, I was in love with him, and At a certain point, I wrote and I told him when the money kept getting stuck in all these different countries, I said, I don't care about the money. Just come. Just you come without the money. It's okay.

But after four failed attempts to meet Donald at the airport and selling her car and her house, Liza had had enough. She enlisted the help of an online investigative company to confirm whether she was being played.

And they showed me who the real guy was, showed me how the pictures were stolen from his profile and his website, and I was speechless. I sat right there, and I went catatonic.

Not only did Liza realize she had been fooled, She found out the man in the photos was also a victim. You know the real guy, Rahul Bornehorst doesn't deal with gold. He's a life coach.

.

Yes, His pictures have been falsely used to create fake social profiles like these on Facebook.

There are so many women calling me from anywhere on the planet. If I would be Secretary of Law in the US, I would go after Facebook and say, I will force you down on the knees. You have to protect those women.

When reached for comment about Rajo's concerns, a spokesperson with Metta sent Impact's statement, confirming they were aware of his case, writing in part, People who impersonate others on Facebook and Instagram violate our policies, and we remove this content when it's found, like in this case, our work in this area is never done. Just last year alone, Metta said the company took down over 2.6 billion fake accounts.

This happens a lot. It's very easy for people to take your pictures offline, and that's what is used in many, many, almost all romantic scams.

Liza says Las Vegas police told her they couldn't help her. Because cryptocurrency cases are outside their jurisdiction and that the FBI didn't respond when she filed for an online report. We reached out to the FBI, but the agency said it can't confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. The Las Vegas Police Department has not responded.

Self-compassion is such an important part of being able to recover from any scheme where a person can give themselves grace and say, You know what? Bad things happen to good people. That doesn't mean that they're any less smart.

Our thanks to us. To hear more of Liza's story and two other shocking accounts of deception, check out Impact by Nightline: How I Got Played, now streaming on Hulu.

Hi, everyone. George Stefanopoulos here. Thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel. If you'd like to get more videos, show highlights, and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel. And don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts. Thanks for watching.