When you think of Internet fraud you probably think of credit card theft or hackers getting into your computer stealing information to make lots of money. If you have been on the net for a while you may have heard of the notorious Nigerian 419 scam. Where unwitting victims are led to believe that a wealthy widower from an oil rich African state wishes to get her money out of the country and requires your help to do so. Sound familiar?
Well the Internet fraud game has taken a more sinister approach preying on lonely people on Internet dating websites. Now don't get me wrong there are probably a lot of genuine young women on Internet dating websites looking for long term relationships. But among these genuine people will be the fraudsters who have set themselves up with a fake profile. In many cases the photo of the person in these profiles is of a rather beautiful woman. Investigate the photos further and you will probably see they are taken off a modelling web site.
The fraudster will spend a lot of time forming an online relationship with their victim or maybe even several victims at once. Our fraudster does not have any morals and while they are leading on several victims in a dating scam, they may also have other little fraud projects setup on the side. One of the fraudsters favourites are fake banking websites setup to capture your credit card details (you know the ones?). To the fraudsters this is their 9-5 job this is how they make their living. The fraudster will eventually come up with a story of how they would like to come over and see their victim but need money for a ticket. The fraudster may also say they require money for a life saving operation. At this stage the victim is so smitten with the fraudster they are willing to give them anything. The fraudster will keep this scam going until the victim either catches on or runs out of money. The fraudster ensures they have a constant stream of cash coming in by having several of these victims lined up, almost like a production line.
There are some key ways to identify these frauds which you can find on the following web sites.
Other ways of identifying fraudsters and not just Internet Dating fraudsters are:
- Are they using a Yahoo email address? For some reason this appears to be the free internet email service of choice for Internet Fraudsters. Its so common someone has even started a directory of fraudster email addresses.
- Is all correspondence in capitals?
- If you Google the address they gave you, you may find its been listed on anti fraud sites. You may also find the address is used by several people.
- If you Google the persons online nickname you may find they are registered on every single dating website out there. Possibly in several different countries.
- If something sounds too good to be true it probably is.