The Global & Personal Cost of Online Fraud

From Buzzfeed.com - https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/romance-scams?utm_term=.st3plwxXl#.mjxvMb3YM

These are victims of a professional, sophisticated, global industry that by some estimates is doubling in size every year.

The US-based Society of Citizens Against Romance Scams (SCARS) estimates that there were 600,000 romance-scam victims globally last year and that there will be a million new victims globally in 2016 – and these are the victims who report the crimes. Most don’t.

SCARS also predicts, based on its own research from studying global police data, that romance scams will see $8 billion sent to Nigeria this year alone.

SCARS’ founder, Tim McGuinness, an early dotcom entrepreneur and a passionate campaigner for better awareness of romance scams, told BuzzFeed News that the problem is larger and more complex than anyone really knows.

He said there are groups as large as 9,000 people running scams in Ghana.

“They’re broken up in models very similar to terrorist cells,” he said. “There’s a small advisory group, usually 6 to 25 individuals, although there are exceptions and some much larger groups of 600 or 700. But they’re part of the same leadership structure that includes several thousand [people] where the leadership pyramid is making a piece of it all.”

He estimates that there are between 20,000 and 40,000 romance scammers operating in Nigeria today. Nigeria, he said, accounts for around 70% of scams, with Ghana in second place with 20%. And increasingly, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam are becoming the growth hot spots for romance fraud.

Romance scams are an evolution of the kind of email fraud now stereotypically associated with Nigeria, the advance-fee scam or 419 scam (so-called after the Nigerian criminal code that governs it) that involves convincing someone to pay a small amount in order to release a huge payment.

They have grown simply because they often work. Scammers have developed a very effective system, involving several psychological tricks to manipulate victims.

Typically, they steal the pictures of an attractive person and where possible, videos too, then create several social media profiles with that picture with many different names (some names and pictures are used over and over again in different scams). SCARS estimates that 50 million fake Facebook profiles are created every year, for various purposes including romance scams.

A single victim might be worked by as many as five or six scammers at one time, so there’s always someone awake and responsive when the victim is online.

Manchester and Liverpool are common locations given on fake Facebook profiles, but since Leicester City’s unlikely victory in the 2015-16 English Premier League season, there has been a noticeable increase in the use of Leicester, perhaps a sign of English football’s cultural importance in western Africa.

The scammers populate their fake profiles with activity, to make them look more believable. Some experts call this “bingeing”, whereby scammers – who are running hundreds and in some cases thousands of fake accounts – “like” a huge number of different pages and interests once a week and come back the week after to do the same. Scammers like to add pictures of puppies and children to make their characters seem endearing and nonthreatening.

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