29 mars 2024

Internet scams: millions of singles at risk

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Hoping to find a partner during the pandemic, a Florida woman signed up for Facebook Dating. Within half an hour, she met "Damian". He was an orthopaedic surgeon who lived a town away, but at the time he was in Yemen on a four-month UN peacekeeping mission.

"He's very handsome. He's very handsome," the unnamed woman tells Mariana van Zeller in an episode of the National Geographic reporter's show "Trafficked." The programme, which airs on Wednesdays at 9pm, explores the various global black markets that sell products such as methamphetamine, plastic surgery and firearms.

She tells van Zeller that Damian "says to me, 'I'm extremely grateful to have you in my life. Spending time with [you] drowns out my other concerns and brightens my life'.

"My heart was really taking over my brain."

And Damian was about to take over his bank account. He concocted a story about gunmen attacking his establishment and that he was afraid for his life. He asked the woman for $15,000 to help pay off his contract so he could go home and be with her. She agreed and lost both the money and the relationship she thought she had.

She was not alone. During the pandemic, the number of cases of men and women looking for love being scammed by online suitors soared.

"There was a 300% increase in romance scams because of the pandemic and the exploitation of people's loneliness," van Zeller told the Post. "In 2020, there was $300 million stolen from US banks."

In a new episode of her documentary series, which aired on Wednesday, van Zeller dives into the underworld of romance scams, talking to both the victims who have been swindled out of money and the perpetrators, many of whom operate out of Ghana, which has become a hub for online fraud.

The four female victims in the episode do not give their names, but they all tell the same story: they were wooed with poems, flirty messages and constant online attention.

One divorcee paid her suitor nearly $300,000. A widow gave her suitor more than $1 million, while a 68-year-old woman paid a whopping $2.8 million.

According to Van Zeller's statement, women are more open about it than men. "They wanted to raise awareness," she said. Male victims are less likely to complain.

Deceived lovers would be surprised to learn that their dream mates are actually criminal teams who use scripts to create a link and fake documents to pose as Americans.

The team members have different roles: There are the hunters, who find potential victims; the forgers, who write the credentials; the actors, who play the romance card; and the finisher, who steps in to close the deal - and takes a larger percentage of the loot. Van Zeller talks to many of the operators in this West African country, who call their victims "clients", which gives their business an air of respectability.

"In Ghana, they speak English," van Zeller said. Despite the country's great technological advance, it also has many economically disadvantaged people without opportunities. There, if you grow up in the slums, you see people scamming, so you do it. [The practice] has even been popularised in the music and culture there."

These scammers patiently wait for the right moment to ask for money, sometimes dragging things out for a year. They even send money and gifts to their targets to appear sincere, and will do anything to trick their victims.

In the episode, a con artist asks a priestess to perform black magic on a Virginia man named Michael, who has already paid over $10,000 to his "girlfriend". Hoping to get more money out of him, the scammer prints a picture of Michael and presents it, along with alcohol, to the priestess, who puts a love spell on the man living more than 5,000 miles away.

"The priestess takes some of the money," van Zeller said. "So it's almost like they're conning the con man."

Ultimately, though, preying on someone's emotions has a strange side effect: affection.

"I actually think there's a lot of empathy. We spoke to a man called Odo who stopped doing it because he couldn't take it anymore. His last victim was evicted from his house. In black markets you often find people who don't care, but that was not the case here," van Zeller revealed. "They said it was impossible not to make a connection.

Indeed, one woman van Zeller spoke to had been "dating" a man for two years. When she learned that he was a hustler in Ghana, she was also surprised to learn that he wanted a real relationship with her. "He was crying and told her he loved her," van Zeller said.

And then there's the man who duped Michael. "I started to fall in love with him - not for sex or anything, but I had feelings for him," the con man says on the show. "Michael has a good heart. I think Michael has been good to me."

MamP's

© Photo Credits : AARP