What Is “Romance Scam”? Are You Currently a Victim? During the Covid-19 pandemic, the successive confinements and curfews did not affect social ties and romantic relationships. Many people, forced to stay at home, reported extreme loneliness. In the hope of finding a soul mate despite the circumstances, many people have not hesitated to try virtual romance by signing up on dating sites or flirting on social networks. A godsend for many web crooks accustomed to the famous “love scam.” But what is it all about? We will explain it to you.
Romance Scams Can Be Expensive to the Victim The “love scam,” also known as the “romance scam,” has been on the Internet for several years. But this phenomenon has been greatly exacerbated in recent months by the health crisis. Recently, a fifty-something man was thus extorted no less than €1,500 in France, believing he had found love. A significant sum, but much lower than other “love scams” cases, where the victims reported having lost from €42,000 to €3 million! Concretely, the love scam consists of a swindler to forge an allegedly loving bond with an Internet user, with many fake photos accompanied by a description invented from scratch to fill in the details of a profile. As reports say, some scammers even go so far as to “memorize a Wikipedia page from a region where they claim to be from” to perfect the illusion. Once the connection has been created with a victim searching for love, a whole system of extortion is set up. The swindler often asks the victim to help him with a purchase, of course promising to reimburse him or her later without this ever happening.
Transfers Via Prepaid Cards As of the case in France, the scammer started by asking him for 50€ here to supposedly buy clothes, before going to the next stage and asking him to pay €1,500. To reassure the man, who ended up worrying about seeing his bank account melt like snow in the sun, the “woman” swindler even went so far as to pay €3,000 in cash via prepaid cards without a bank account to the internet user in love. The sum of €3,000 corresponded to €1,500 in reimbursement and €1,500, which he (the victim) would return to the lover (scanner) later because the alleged sweetheart “was messing around in the painting business” and preferred “to launder the money.”
But as reports say, this money, transferred to the 50-year-old’s bank account by his “beloved,” turned out to be money from another bank account, itself hacked and whose owner filed a complaint. As found out by the victim, his lover is a scammer, and he will no longer benefit from bank insurance and would have to pay back the money he received to his bank account from the scammer.
A Record Amount In 2020 In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that “Internet users who are victims of these practices in the United States have lost a total of $ 304 million in 2020”, which is 50% more than in 2019. On average, this works out to about $ 2,500 per victim. In a report published on the subject, the FTC further points out that while the most targeted age group is 40-69 years, the highest amounts are those defrauded from victims over 70 years. On average, they lost $ 9,475 per person in 2020. Cybera helps victims of financially motivated crimes like romance scams with quick legal steps to recover their lost funds or prevent being victims.