The 18th Century model of Casanova is a smooth-talking charmer who has mastered the art of finding, meeting, attracting and seducing beautiful women into the bedroom.
The 21st Century version is a Casanova with the very worst of intentions. A dastardly, deceptive and duplicitous rogue who preys on both sexes. Meet the Romance Scammer. The only thing they plan to fall in love with is your wealth.
Fundamentally, these unabashed con artists usually operate as teams but often pretend to be a single person. They target people looking for a relationship online by pretending to be someone interested in love and romance. As far as they’re concerned, all is fair in love and war.
To attract the people who will become their victims, scammers create fake profiles on dating websites and apps or on social media platforms like Facebook. They tailor these profiles to suit the preferences of the people they are targeting. They go to great, and convincing, lengths to build the illusion of a genuine person looking for an equally genuine relationship. Once the victim starts to trust the scammer, they are then manipulated into making payments, sharing their banking information, or unknowingly participating in drug trafficking and money laundering.
Not only the lonely
Romance scammers try to find people who are trusting and looking for a relationship. They identify their victims based on the personal information they have gleaned from online encounters. The ‘losing’ formula for this fraud is that the more information a person shares, the easier it is for a con artist to use that information for gain. Scammers don’t have a gender bias but the majority of targets are women in the 40 to 65-age bracket, but men are not immune.
Victim impact report
Advocacy Group Age UK reports that 43% of older people – almost five million people aged 65+ – believe they have been targeted by scammers.
The lobbying group American Association of Retired People say the older the victim, the heavier the financial toll. The median individual loss for people aged 70+ and over was $10,000.
Statistics gathered by Age Concern in New Zealand found that in 2015 over $13 million was lost via Internet Fraud. On average, this broke down to nearly $13,000 per victim. In one case an individual lost $2.1 million.
What’s love got to do with it?
Of all the different kinds of cybercrime, romance frauds often result in the greatest financial losses to individual victims. Romance scammers typically start by asking for only a small amount of money. This is a technique used to ease the victim into the swindle slowly. If successful, inevitably this overture will be followed by further requests for increasingly larger sums.