Gay romance scams

[bcohen7719]

This has been discussed in-depth here before. However, I found this

website with some intriguing additional information.

 

BC

 

http://www.scamwarners.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&p=59538

[bigvalboy]

Excellent post...an excellent article. We should all be thanking you for keeping this topic front and center. Sites like Daddy's are invaluable to many of us older clients. Time and time again members reveal scams or talk about the latest things that these guys are doing to lure us into a scam... Thanks again!!

[robberbaron4u]

Live and learn. My godson has been "working" gullible mature gay marks given to alcohol abuse for twenty-five years. He is the master of the "Wimpy Maneouvre": For the price of a hamburger today, I will gladly pay you on Tuesday." And, as one "pro", scouting for a new"significant other", related to me: "I golf, gamble, and, as long as my bills are paid, I show up when I'm wanted."

[bigvalboy]

Live and learn. My godson has been "working" gullible mature gay marks given to alcohol abuse for twenty-five years. He is the master of the "Wimpy Maneouvre": For the price of a hamburger today, I will gladly pay you on Tuesday." And, as one "pro", scouting for a new"significant other", related to me: "I golf, gamble, and, as long as my bills are paid, I show up when I'm wanted."

 

Or as I said to one "working boy" who stopped by our table at "The Numbers" one night, and was clearly "working it" in regards to the possibility of me hiring him. With a little smirk on my face I said, "Young man, are you trying to hustle me" he smiled back and said, "Of course I am, that's why they call it "Hustling"...couldn't argue with that. At least he told the truth. Oh and for the record, I passed on his offer...

[robberbaron4u]

Ain't no dust on us, BigValBoy!

[seattlebottom]

Some years ago someone in Russia tried pulling a scam on me from some dating site that I can't remember now. I had known about the tactics before but I played along to see how long it would take for the scam to reveal itself. After about 6 e-mail exchanges he finally told me how desperately he wanted to see me but didn't have the $900 for an airplane ticket. I never responded and I never got another e-mail.

[trilingual]

While all these warnings should be heeded, the fact is that lots of people meet online these days. I met my partner online (on Gaydar). We've been together 8 years and just got married in New York in August. In a number of cultures it's not uncommon for younger men to be attracted to older ones. Not everyone, of course, and not all the time. But it's not as unusual as in the U.S. A desire for economic security may be part of it, but that doesn't preclude attraction and love, too. However, if you sign up for GayRomeo you will get deluged with messages, mainly from guys in Ghana and the Philippines, that you just have to ignore. GayRomeo now has a feature where you can designate a message as spam so you don't get repeated messages from the same sender. It won't take you long to recognize the spam messages because they seem to have a limited number of scripts that they keep reusing, so you'll recognize the language and syntax from previous messages and you can just mark them spam and don't respond.

[+ dutchmuch]

• U.S.
  

Dating-Website Users Fall Prey to Fraudster Profiles

Accounts created with photos of real people are increasingly being used to lure victims to send ‘loans’

Wall St. Journal 1SEPT2016

 

There's a new trend in dating: crime rings and fraudsters who are targeting U.S. victims via phony dating profiles on popular sites like Match.com, PlentyofFish.com and others. Photo: Bob Miller for the Wall Street Journal.

By

JENNIFER LEVITZ

Updated Sept. 1, 2016 10:43 a.m. ET

40 COMMENTS

A fast-growing breed of global internet crime is revealing a troubling trend: Some fraudsters are easily infiltrating popular dating sites to fleece people out of their savings, law-enforcement officials say.

Cyber-swindlers lift photos of real people from the internet, and use the images to create fictitious profiles on dating sites such as Match.com, part of Match Group Inc. and the dominant brand in the U.S.’s $2.5 billion dating-services industry.

Victims lost nearly $120 million to “romance scams” in the first six months of 2016, up 23% from the year-earlier period, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which collects data on crimes primarily reported in the U.S. The $203 million in losses from romance scams in 2015 exceeded most other internet crimes tracked by the center.

Dating sites maintain they guard against phony profiles, but “a lot slip through,” said Bruce Reppert, assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Illinois. With the popularity of the internet, “I’ve not known of a romance scam that has not first started on a dating website.”

Romance scammers often claim to be Americans temporarily working overseas, said Monica Whitty, a professor at the Cyber Security Centre at the University of Warwick in England and a romance-scam expert. After a sometimes extended “grooming” process, the suitor manufactures emergencies and requests “loans,” saying his own funds are temporarily tied up, said Ms. Whitty. Once hooked, victims struggle to cut ties because they become emotionally attached and because they often have “lent” large sums of money and want to get it back. Scammers typically target people middle-aged and up, said U.S. authorities.

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“Anyone could be a victim of this given the right kind of circumstance,” said Mr. Reppert, the Illinois prosecutor.

His office prosecuted Olayinka Ilumsa Sunmola, a Nigerian man who was extradited to the U.S. and is awaiting sentencing, for what federal prosecutors described as being the ringleader of a South African-based crime organization. The group used photos of American men to create bogus profiles on the dating sites Match.com, PlentyOfFish and eHarmony as well as Myspace, and bilked nearly $700,000 from 53 U.S. victims between 2008 and 2013, prosecutors said.

 

“Increasing consumer complaints of online scams and sexual predators on dating websites” are starting to worry state officials, IBISWorld, a market-research firm cautioned in an April report. New York and New Jersey are among a handful of states with laws requiring dating sites to tell customers whether they perform background checks. Officials in other states have discussed similar measures or voiced concern. “Some online daters are con artists in disguise,” Ohio’s attorney general publicly warned in February.

Mandy Ginsberg, chief executive of Match Group North America, which also runs PlentyofFish, said scams affect a tiny percentage of 3.3 million paid members in North America, and that antifraud efforts block “tens of thousands of people” from getting onto the site. Match said it requires customers to pledge not to send money to other users. “As long as our members don’t do that, these kinds of things cannot happen,” the company said in a statement.

MySpace and eHarmony didn’t respond to requests for comment.

ENLARGE

Wilma Jensen, with her son, Dave, who helped her deal with the fallout of losing more $120,000 to a man she met on Match.com. PHOTO: BOB MILLER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In one of the largest U.S. cyber-financial fraud cases yet, defendants are to be tried in January in Mississippi, where many of their victims were located, for an alleged multimillion-dollar scheme involving many types of scams and stretching from South Africa to Canada to the U.S. The defendants preyed, in part, upon victims they met on dating sites, including Match’s SeniorPeopleMeet.com, prosecutors said.

Match said on two email addresses authorities contacted it about, Match had blocked the fraudulent users before they could interact with other users. Match declined to discuss other defendants.

Separately, after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal, United Kingdom investigators said they are looking into a case in which an 84-year-old Indiana widow sent more than $120,000 to London accounts after striking up a virtual relationship with “Chris” who she met on Match.com last summer. With a free reverse-image search tool that scours the internet for similar photos, the Journal quickly determined Chris’s image was a stock photo for sale on Shutterstock.

Two other U.S. women say they were ensnared in the same scheme using different phony profiles on Match.com. “Rick” of Illinois was in fact a photo of a Houston sales manager with a different name, The Journal’s reverse-image search showed. “Bruce” of Albuquerque was actually a photo of Mark Scott, former managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Mr. Scott’s photo was easily spotted at the media company’s website. “I think it raises questions for those offering commercial services like this—surely the website itself should be running these checks,” said Mr. Scott, referring to Match.com. Mr. Scott added that he was “dismayed my photo has been used in this way—and for the harm suffered by the victim of the scam.”

Like many paid sites, Match.com lets people set up profiles to browse free of charge in hopes of converting them to paying members. Subscribers pay about $40 for a single month, with lower rates for longer commitments.

Match said it takes steps to keep out the unsavory, such as weeding out anyone previously blocked from Match or on the national sex offender registry. The company said it also blocks users from certain countries in Africa and Eastern Europe, declining to provide more details.

Mark Swindell, who worked at Match from 2005 until 2011 and was a manager of quality and training, said the company outsources the task of approving new-user profiles to a company in the Dominican Republic. He said workers there had quotas for screening photos and typically took less than a minute to review each photo.

Match confirmed that a Dominican Republic team screens profiles, watching for indecent images and questionable text, and that there were quotas. “Quotas are based on historical data and what an agent should be able to reasonably process and still maintain a high quality of excellence,” the company said.

Profiles deemed suspicious are further reviewed by Match’s U.S. risk team, while fraud specialists also monitor the site, according to the company. It said its “sophisticated in-house technologies and one of the largest customer service teams in the industry” has led to “a consistent decline in fraud the last five years.”

But the company said it doesn’t cross-reference photos with the broader online community—such as with a reverse-image search—because it believes that would flag too many legitimate customers, such as those who may go by different user names on social media, for instance, as suspicious.

“If there was technology that enabled us to alleviate the massive amounts of false positives, we’d do it,” said Match’s Ms. Ginsberg.

Stitch.net, a site for socializers and daters age 50-plus, said its members must verify their identities before communicating with other users. One security system Stitch uses checks members’ webcam photos against their photo IDs and pictures of them holding their ID. It also confirms IDs are real.

About 15% of daily applicants are turned away because they are scammers, said co-founder Marcie Rogo. “They are scouring the internet for seniors,” she said.