A 54-year-old businessman in Queensland, Australia, was recently cheated out of $300,000 by a pig butcher.

The victim, Paul Reed, said he had a crush on a woman he met on his LinkedIn account.

"It's kind of like friendship, and then it starts to get a little heavy."

After the relationship became intimate, she said she needed help from people overseas to withdraw millions of dollars from bank accounts that rightfully belonged to her.

Reid was immediately suspicious, but the video of the woman called him and provided forged documents to verify her identity.

After he agreed, the swindler took him $300,000 step by step according to the routine.

"He thought the women he was talking to on LinkedIn were in fact real until he actually saw the pictures of the potential suspects in Nigeria," Queensland police said.

Drawing on his own lessons, Mr. Reid warned, "If you're looking for love, try to find it the old-fashioned way."

Australians lost a record $3 billion to scams last year, and he's not the only one, with each scam recorded by authorities costing an average of $20,000 per victim.

According to the latest Targeting Scams report, scammers made at least $3.1b in 2022, an 80 percent increase over the total losses recorded the previous year. Part of the reason for this rise is that scammers are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to lure and deceive their victims.

"Australians will lose more money to scams by 2022 than ever before, but the true cost of scams is much more than a dollar, as they also cause emotional distress to victims, their families and businesses," said Catriona Lowe, deputy chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

"New strategies have emerged to make scams harder to detect," Ms Lowe said.

"This includes everything from official phone numbers, email addresses and websites posing as legitimate organisations to scam texts appearing in the same conversation thread as real messages."