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FBI Warns of an Increase in Online Romance Scams

posted by Fnord666 on Monday August 31 2020, @08:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the put-you-money-where-your-heart-is dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

FBI warns of an increase in online romance scams:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation warns of online romance scams (also known as confidence fraud), an ongoing criminal activity that continues to cause large financial losses along with emotional effects with unpredictable consequences.

[...] "According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which provides the public with a means of reporting Internet-facilitated crimes, romance scams result in greater financial losses to victims when compared to other online crimes." reads the alert published by the FBI. "In 2019, almost 20,000 complaints categorized as romance scams were reported to IC3 (about 1,000 more than the previous year), and the losses associated with those complaints exceeded $475 million."

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday August 31 2020, @10:37PM (3 children)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Monday August 31 2020, @10:37PM (#1044732)

    Early 80s, dating apps. A friend and I setup accounts, nothing. A month goes by, nada. Another month, we get the bright idea to setup fake accounts where we are female.

    We could not keep up. This was the era of 1200/2400 baud modems, I could read at 1200 baud but not 2400. Dan and I were just inundated with dating requests from horny hackers, just like we were.

    Too bad we didn't swing that way (NTTATWWT), we could have sucked a lot of dick without seeing a single pussy for years.

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    When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
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  • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday August 31 2020, @10:54PM (2 children)

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Monday August 31 2020, @10:54PM (#1044736) Journal
    See, you were ahead of your time. Almost all the women on dating sites are bots, so it really is "computer dating."

    So many of the women are male Nigerians. They are even using voice changers for voice calls, but you can bet they won't FaceTime or Skype or Zoom their victims.

    Dating sites should be shut down for consumer fraud.

    And I have very little sympathy for the scammed - they are enablers. Every time they pay, they are showing scammers that this is a good way to make money. Same as all those who think some Nigerian oil officials are going to give them $5 million if they just send money for bribes.

    This is 2020. There have been so many tv shows exposing catfishes that there's no excuse.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2020, @01:07AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2020, @01:07AM (#1044784)

      That's not true. I regularly dated online before getting married and there's no way that the number of bots is as high as you're implying. If that were true virtually 100% of the actual women I was contacting, as opposed to bots, was agreeing to go out with me on dates. I'm a great catch, but that seems a bit of a stretch.