Romance Fraud
As more and more of our day to day activities move online, it is only natural that we start moving our personal lives, including our love interests, online as well.
But meeting someone new online can sometimes be more dangerous than meeting a stranger at your local bar. Sensitive people are more vulnerable to romance fraud scams, based on a recent study conducted by the British Psychological Society.
A romance scam is a confidence trick involving feigned romantic intentions towards a victim, gaining their affection, and then using that goodwill to commit fraud.
Fraudulent acts may involve access to the victims' money, bank accounts, credit cards, passports, e-mail accounts, or national identification numbers or by getting the victims to commit financial fraud on their behalf. In many instances, foreign romance scams will also bait the victim into committing felonies to establish citizenship for the assailant.
Some romance scammers seek out a niche of various fetishes where they will find an obscure fetish and they will make the victim think that if they pay for the scammer's plane ticket, they will get to live out a sexual fantasy of theirs by having the scammer come to them to have sex. The scammers also like to entice victims to perform sexual acts on webcam. They then record their victims, play back the recorded images or videos to them and then extort money to prevent them from sending the recordings to friends, family, employers, often discovered via social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc
The pro-dater romance fraud differs from the other romance scams in method of operation; a face-to-face meeting actually does take place in the scammer's country but is devoted solely into manipulating the victim into spending as much money as possible in relatively little time, with little or nothing in return. The scheme usually involves accomplices, such as an interpreter and a taxi driver, all of which must be paid by the victim at an inflated price. Everything is pre-arranged so that the wealthy foreigner pays high amounts of money for accommodation, is taken not to an ordinary public café but to the most costly restaurant (usually some out-of-the-way place priced far above what locals would ever be willing to pay), and is manipulated into making various expensive purchases, including gifts such as electronics and fur coats
There are many more types of fraudulent romance scams and at NiB (National Investigations Bureau) we are well experienced in tracking and tracing romance fraudsters to the benefit of our clients.