Online Investment Scams and Romance Scams in 2022
Online dating has been one of the most popular ways to find lasting love or a romantic interest in the past several years. And like any good thing that has become popular, it has created opportunities for scammers. In fact, people have reported losing around $1.3 billion to romance scams in the past five years and it reached an astounding record of $547 million in 2021. That is an 80% increase compared to 2020 and six times the reported loss of value in 2017. Most people who fell victim to online investment scams and online dating scams lost a median amount of $2,400.
People fall
for romance scams because the scammers are adept at disguising who they are as
well as their intent. They often use fake profiles with photos taken from the
web or stolen from real people. They can also create a tailored persona by
studying the information shared by someone online and presenting themselves as
the perfect mate. The persona that they create usually includes details that
are built-in excuses for not meeting in person. One example would be a scammer
who is claiming to be working as military personnel abroad or a fraudster
claiming to be working as an offshore personnel in an oil rig.
Most individuals
who fell victim to an online romance scam were contacted via dating apps by random
people. Some were contacted on social media and were not even looking for love.
About a third of people who fell for a romance scam in 2021 were contacted via Instagram
or Facebook.
The scammers
weave all sorts of believable tales to defraud people, but note that their
usual MO is that they are in a financial or health crisis. The so called
“crisis” tend to have no end in sight as long as the money keeps coming and is
made available to them. The narrative may involve a sick family member or child,
at times, they may also indicate that they have fell victim to a scam or a fraud of some sort and
need your help. These scammers may also try to get your buy in by saying they
need help in cashing in on an inheritance they have received from a relative
abroad or state that they need to move funds in order to solidify a lucrative business
deal. What tends to happen is these victims essentially become money mules and think
that they're just helping. They could fall unsuspecting to money laundering schemes
or even get tricked into sending their own money. These fictious transfers
could also involve exorbitant fees that the victim will shell out believing
that they will be repaid later.
Fraudulent or
fictitious investments in form of cryptocurrency became a growing trend in 2021
for many scammers. The victims believed that their new online friend is someone
who is well versed in crypto or is a successful investor who is only trying to
help them navigate this new way of making money. And so, they end up investing large
sums of their savings following bogus advice. Then the scammer will basically
disappear with the invested funds, because they were never invested in the first
place.
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