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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: 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.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Wednesday September 02 2020, @12:30AM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Wednesday September 02 2020, @12:30AM (#1045181) Journal
    I of the 5.5 million women's profiles on Ashley Madison, about 99.8% were found to be fake. So millions of men paid to message fake women (women had free accounts) https://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-madison-database-1725558944 [gizmodo.com]
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