Image by mezzoblue via Flickr
By Mark C Lim
Trust me on this one – if you are a member of a dating site, you will be approached by a scammer. It will be sooner rather than later. It matters not whether you are male or female. Both sexes are equally vulnerable. Middle-aged and retirees are particular targets.
Scammers prey on your need for love and companionship. They play on your emotions to trick you to give them money, gifts or your banking and credit card details. They are often very patient and could groom you for months. A lot of victims have fallen for this and many have lost their life savings!
Scammers can easily create fake profiles and use attractive photographs on dating websites. The anonymity of the internet is such that a 20 year old woman in Nigeria could pretend to be a handsome 45 year old expatriate Australian man working in Africa. They do not even need to be of the opposite sex – scammers frequently work in pairs or groups!
Once they have targeted you, they will express deep feelings for you in a relatively short period of time and will quickly get you to move from the security and anonymity of the dating website to external contacts using the phone, email or instant messaging. They will be in constant, even persistent, contact with you, building your trust and love and even sending you flowers and small gifts. They are polished in their approach – remember you are not the first target and you could be one of tens of simultaneous targets he/she is grooming at the same time.
When they sense that they have you hooked, they will ask you for money or financial assistance using a variety of reasons.
- A relative or family member is grievously sick and needs urgent medical treatment.
- They have been robbed, beaten, fallen ill or been badly injured in an accident and needs funds urgently and the only person they can rely on is you.
- They are stranded abroad and do not have money for visa and travel arrangements.
- They want to fly to visit you but their funds are tied up for some time. Once you provide the funds for the air ticket, they will come back to you with the assertion that they need more funds to show that they have the financial capacity to stay in the country (which most countries do require). You wait and wait at the airport and they never show up.
- They have won or come into a large sum of money and need funds to pay administration fees or taxes to be able to take the money out of the country.
They will often ask that the money be sent using money transfer services like Western U and MoneyGram. Money sent by these means are almost impossible to recover. Once you send money, they will keep asking you for more and keep milking you until you are broke or come to your senses.
Instead of asking you for money, they could ask you to do the following for them:
- Launder money for them – they will ask for your bank account details, deposit money into it and ask you to transfer the money to them using Western U or similar. This is illegal and you could be prosecuted and also liable to reimburse the money transferred.
- Bank money orders or cheques for them and transfer the money to them. These fraudulent or stolen money orders and cheques will be rejected by the bank and you will be out of pocket.
- Re-ship goods for them that they have purchased with stolen credit cards and delivered to your address.
Be very wary and be on guard against scammers. Do not let your emotions get in the way. Think twice, no three times, before you even contemplate sending money to someone you meet online. Do a search online for the name, email address and any other key phrases to see if they are known scammers. There are lots of websites with information on dating scams.
Mark Lim is the webmaster for an online dating site in Australia, www.endlessdates.com.au. He is slowly but surely promoting the site in the search engines. He is also the author of an ebook Customizing eMeeting Dating Software.
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