Online Dating Scams Infographic
What is it?
When a scammer communicates with you on a dating site or social media site through a genuine looking profile and fakes an interest in you. Later on, once they have gained your trust, they will use it to try and scam you out of money and personal information to steal your identity.
What to Look out for:
- Forcefully asking you for personal information: If someone wants to steal your identity, they will want as much information about you as they can possible get. They may ask you weird and unexpected questions, for example, your mother’s maiden name.
- Revealing very little about themselves: Them only wanting to talk about you may seem quite charming at first, but watch out for them changing the subject if you ask something about them. Fraudsters will be determined to keep their identity a secret so they will never reveal information about themselves.
- Refusing to speak over the phone or meet in person: Once you have spoken over messenger for a while, it’s normal to want to speak over the phone to at least know the sound of their voice. Fraudsters will commonly refuse to do this, again trying to reveal as little about themselves as possible.
- Asking for money: This will be the main giveaway! After gaining your trust, they will request money for reasons including; arranging to visit you but they can’t afford it, they need money for their children and they can’t access their bank account, they have medical issues and can’t afford treatment.
- Pushing for a serious relationship very quickly: We all know it takes time to build a relationship and to fall in love (in most cases). Fraudsters, however, will try to steal your heart by being very romantic and making claims that they love you very soon after starting to speak to you. This is their attempt to gain your trust as quickly as possible.
- Bad punctuation and grammar: A lot of these scams are committed from fraudsters who live overseas who don’t always have the best English. Watch out for disjointed sentences and bad punctuation, especially if they claim to be English!
Statistics
- 1 victim reports an online dating scam every 3 hours. (City of London Police – 2017)
- The average amount of money lost per victim in the UK is £10,000
- On average, the fraudster requests a money transfer within 1 month of contact
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