The feds want a Virginia grandmother to pay a whopping $378,000 stolen in a $2 million romance scam.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., or FDIC, claims Cynthia Concordia is on the hook for the cash lost by Signature Bank in the long-running scheme, so infamous, Hulu aired a documentary about it.
But Concordia, 64, who’s been fighting off the feds for two years, said she’s as much a victim as anyone else.
“I was so gullible,” the single mother of two lamented to The Post.
In November 2019, the retired World Bank analyst received a message from a stranger on LinkedIn using the name Mason Brown Thuthill who claimed to work for Blockchain, a popular cryptocurrency platform.
“Thuthill” encouraged her to invest, pledging to quickly double her returns. At the time, she was struggling to pay off her son’s roughly $20,000 annual college tuition to the Culinary Institute of America in the Hudson Valley and thinking of the future.
“I just wanted to make sure that they have enough when I die,” Concordia said. “It’s not for me. It’s for my children, it’s for my family.”
Eventually she caved, handing over $700 to the stranger, who had changed his name to Brian Haugen.
Haugen, an actor from Los Angeles, is also a victim, with thousands of thieves stealing his image and hiding behind it in online profiles to target older women in an ongoing romance scam, according to court papers.
The con was featured in the 2025 ABC News Studios documentary, “Hey Beautiful: Anatomy of a Romance Scam.”
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The con man reached out every day, Concordia said, with often lengthy phone calls.
“He started convincing me to invest, started saying, ‘I care so much about you, this is for you, this is for your future.
“He even cried,” she recalled.
The two would pray together, she recalled.
“I have struggled with you because two things. I love you and the earnest desire for you is to see you succeed and be happy,” the scammer told her, according to court papers.
When Concordia pushed for a video or in-person meeting, he put her off.
“Cynthia, I can’t be seen having an affair with clients. It’s against company policy. That’s why I told you after the whole investment, then I can be with you,” he said, according to a deposition.
She eventually forked over $47,000 of her own cash to the scammer, and allegedly accepted massive wire transfers and bought bitcoin at his direction.
She didn’t get wise to the illicit plot until July 2021, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation called.
“I think I’m the only one that was left. They couldn’t go after the scammer,” she said of the FDIC lawsuit, insisting she never spent a penny of the ill-gotten gains — and noting her scammer is in the wind.
“I’m not sure going after a naive grandmother who is a victim herself is really what the FDIC is for, but we will see how this all plays out,” said Concordia’s lawyer, James DeCristofaro, who filed court papers Friday in a bid to toss the case.
The FDIC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
