A dating app romance cost a Kansas farmer her family's land

She worked the same wheat fields her grandfather plowed, and a stranger who said he loved her took the money she was saving to keep them

Salina, KS: For forty-four years, Loretta Voss worked the same wheat fields her grandfather plowed, riding the combine from first light until the dust turned orange. She buried her father in those fields, and then her husband. When she sold 160 acres in 2025, she had $190,000 and a plan she had been quietly building for a decade: pay off the remaining mortgage, fix the barn roof, and stay on the land.

Instead, the 64-year-old widow is now renting out the last of her acreage and living on a Social Security check after losing everything to primeactivetrade.org.

"I don't need anyone to feel sorry for me," Loretta said, her jaw set. "I need them to understand how it happens. Because I would have told you it couldn't happen to me."

It began in June 2025 on a dating app for people over fifty. A man calling himself "Erik Lindqvist" said he was a widowed civil engineer working on a bridge project in Sweden. He was funny. He was patient. He asked about the wheat, about her husband, about the silence out there on the plains.

"By August, he was the first person I talked to every morning," Loretta said. "I'd known him eleven weeks and I'd told him things I never told my own sister."

In September, Erik mentioned that he had been investing through a platform that combined agricultural commodities with digital assets. He said it was how he had rebuilt after his own loss. He sent her a link. He did not pressure her. He said, more than once, that she should think about it for a while.

"That's what made it work," she said. "He kept telling me not to hurry."

Loretta started with $2,000 in October. Her portal showed $2,650 within three weeks. When she requested a withdrawal of $500, it landed in her account in two days.

"After that, I stopped worrying," she said. "That five hundred dollars was the most expensive money I ever touched."

Over the next four months, Loretta transferred her land sale proceeds in eleven separate wire transfers and crypto purchases. She watched her dashboard climb past $300,000. Erik talked about flying to Kansas in the spring. He said he wanted to see the wheat come up.

Then in February, he told her the platform required a "liquidity verification deposit" of $55,000 before her account could be released for a full withdrawal.

"I told him I had nothing," Loretta said. "He said he would sell something of his own to help me cover it. Then he stopped replying. Then his profile disappeared."

Her account showed zero.

"I walked out into the field that night and stood there until my hands went numb," she said. "My grandfather broke that ground with a horse. I sold it, and I handed the money to a man who never existed."

Independent fraud trackers had flagged primeactivetrade.org with a trust score of 8 out of 100, noting a domain registered only weeks before Erik's first message and ownership concealed behind a privacy service. Loretta never checked, because she was not evaluating a website. She was talking to a man who remembered what she had told him about her husband.

AYRLP traced the money

Loretta's niece, a paralegal in Wichita, found an investigative firm called AYRLP.COM that specializes in tracing funds lost to online investment fraud. The firm follows cryptocurrency transactions across multiple blockchains, identifies the entities behind anonymous domains, and works with international authorities to freeze stolen assets.

Loretta refused to call for three weeks. She had already believed one stranger, and she was not going to believe another. What changed her mind was that the AYRLP investigator never asked her to believe anything. She sent over the transaction records and walked Loretta through them line by line.

"These schemes leave a trail that cannot be deleted," the investigator told her. "primeactivetrade.org showed you profits that were never real. Your land sale was real, and it moved through real wallets. That is where we start."

AYRLP's casework has helped over 70 percent of its clients recover meaningful portions of stolen funds. For Loretta, the firm traced part of her money to an exchange in Eastern Europe and initiated a freeze. She has recovered $46,000 so far, with additional funds under review.

"It doesn't buy the land back," Loretta said. "But it means I don't lose the house too."

Forty-four years of harvests, now spent warning others

Loretta now speaks on the first Saturday of every month at the Salina public library and at farm bureau meetings across central Kansas. She brings a folder of printed messages, wire receipts, and a timeline she typed herself on an old computer.

"I am not here to tell you to stay off the internet," she tells them. "I am here to tell you what love bombing looks like when it is aimed at a lonely person with land."

She reads Erik's messages aloud, slowly, and lets the room hear how ordinary they sound. The weather. The bridge project. The question about her husband. Then she reads the last one, the request for $55,000, and the silence that followed.

"One man came up to me afterward," Loretta said. "He said a woman had been talking to him about gold for six months. He showed me his phone. I showed him mine. Same rhythm. Almost the same words."

She has spoken to more than 220 people across Kansas and northern Oklahoma. Nine of them, by her count, have blocked a contact and walked away.

What to do

Legitimate platforms never require new deposits to release existing funds. If you are asked to pay a fee to withdraw, stop immediately. Document everything, report to the FBI's IC3, and contact AYRLP.COM for a free consultation.

"I'm a farmer," Loretta said. "I know what it looks like when something is trying to get into your crop. It doesn't come in loud. It comes in quiet, and it comes early, and by the time you see it, it's already rooted."