22 Online Dating

Every day thousands use their computers to find potential partners, true love or casual encounters online. While there are many lucrative online businesses facilitating this, there are also many opportunities for criminals posing as potential dates or running fraudulent dating websites. The most common scam is men posing as attractive young women (often in another country) in order to pull the heartstrings of gullible men into sending money to their supposed online girlfriends. Reasons typically given range from money for flights to meet up, a family crisis, or a medical emergency. Talking via instant messaging means that weeks or months can go by without the victim realising that they have never been talking to who they thought they were.

The criminals can also string along over a dozen or more men at the same time, sending them photos of other women, or links to fake Facebook accounts. In more advanced versions of this scam, an attractive young woman is also one of the criminals, allowing for face to face webcam sessions, Skype calls and other social online interactions. The latest version of this scam involves the women striping over webcams and getting the men to do the same as well as other cybersex activities. The video footage is recorded by the women though and used to blackmail the men by threatening to circulate the video to work colleagues and social media sites.

Men are not the only target though, as it turns out women are more likely to victims of romance fraud than men, according to Victim Support in England and Wales. Recently in the news was a report about a 54-year old scientist who was tricked into thinking she was in a relationship with a British soldier serving in Afghanistan. She even accepted a marriage proposal after a being sent a photo of the soldier holding a banner asking her to marry him. Subsequent events led her to giving him over £20,000, most of which was for flights and bribes due to corrupt officials during the coronavirus crisis. The whole scam unravelled when she sent a photo of her fiancée to an ex-military acquaintance, who told her that the uniform was wrong.

Over a year between August 2019 and August 2020, the UK's national fraud reporting service Action Fraud, received over 400 reports a month from victims of romance fraud. Over £66,335,239 was lost by victims over this period, with an average of around £10,000 per person, though some lost their entire life savings, all due to dating and romance scams. Worse still are the women who have been tricked into becoming drug mules and ended up in prison in a foreign country. In one case the woman was groomed into thinking she was part of a business deal and that see was taking contract documents. Many fall for advance fee fraud scams or are tricked into sending money supposedly to soldiers in need.  Either way the globally this is a big earner for the criminals.

It is important to understand that anyone can easily create a fake online identity, and once you have an email address, you can then open social media accounts and populate them with other people's photos. Facebook estimate that fake accounts represented approximately 5% of their worldwide monthly active users (MAU) on Facebook during Q2 2020, which works out to a mind boggling 12,800,000 fake accounts. So how can you tell if Angela, the 20-year-old East European law student isn't actually Andrew, a 29-year-old male in North Africa? Or that Mark from New Zealand is really a yoga instructor travelling through Europe. If you can, talk to each other over a live webcam, otherwise ask them for a couple of photos of themselves with famous local landmarks in the background. If you are even slightly suspicious, ask them if they could take a picture of themselves holding a piece of paper with your name on it, which if they are using photos taken from other people’s social media accounts, they won’t be able to do. Some online dating websites like Zoosk can validate photos, this is done via their smartphone app which uses the camera to take a short video of the person looking forward, looking to the right and then to the left. Generally, even with verified photos, if someone you have never actually met in person asks you for money, statistically it's probably a scam. Also, never contact anyone from a spam email claiming to be looking for love.

To avoid the fraudulent dating websites, stick to mainstream online dating companies that advertise in magazines and newspapers. If you receive an email claiming you have been given a free account with an online dating service, or have replies for a dating website you never joined, delete it. Do not follow the link and contact them to get yourself removed from their client list.

All forms of internet communication can easily be stored and archived by the other person or site provider, anything you type, say, or gesture in a video. Bear this in mind if you have a lot to lose if your family or work colleagues were to get hold of any records of your online dating activities. This extends to the more dubious dating sites that encourage affairs or casual hook-ups, like Adult Friend Finder and Ashley Madison. Both were hacked, and the information was used for blackmail, fraud and other crimes. Nearly 4 million users of Adult Friend Finder have had their details posted online that included sexual preferences, while 37 million users of Ashley Madison were affected by the hack.

Don’t forget the same applies to dating apps, everything you do is logged on someone’s server somewhere.

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