Tinder whatsapp scam8/9/2023 “A scammer can create multiple fake profiles from any location - with real photos and stolen information,” says Petrunina. China, India and the USA top the list of scam hot spots on Pure’s app 10-15% of users from these countries are fake. They make it nearly impossible to track the location of a user - a key piece of the scam profile puzzle. Petrunina says VPNs (virtual private networks) pose a particular challenge to scam prevention. Petrunina says Pure experienced a four-fold increase in fake monthly active users in 2021 - and that scammers are using increasingly sophisticated techniques and technology to trap their victims.Ī scammer can create multiple fake profiles from any location - with real photos and stolen information She thinks more should be done to educate online daters about fraud because she “had no idea that romance scammers even existed”. “Sometimes, I don’t get up in the morning because I have given him everything.”Īalia’s experience is a textbook case in how romance scammers prey on dating platform users. “I am in serious financial trouble and may lose everything I can’t even put food on my table,” she tells Sifted through tears. By November 2022 – just five months after the pair met – Aalia had sent Michael a total of £70k using money transfer apps, fake cryptocurrency platforms and gift cards. Soon the loan requests began to snowball to finance a spiralling list of needs – medical bills, lawyers, travel, food. She set up a Wise account and wired him the money. He first asked for a loan of $2,000 for a flight from Mexico to Florida. But a month in, Michael started to have cashflow problems. “He was so loving – I didn’t suspect anything,” she says.Īalia was smitten. The two hit it off quickly and within a few weeks were talking about marriage. Within a few days she’d struck up a relationship with Michael, a man who said he was an oil rigger from Florida. She signed up to the American dating website MeetMe after being single for 12 years. That’s how it all played out for Aalia (not her real name), a 47-year-old healthcare worker from the UK, back in April 2022. Since being founded in 2012, Pure has been downloaded 20m times. “This is because scammers are aware that dating platforms are constantly improving their detection and moderation systems, so they need to work quickly too,” says Olga Petrunina, CEO of Ukrainian sex-positive dating app, Pure. When meeting “the one” comes at a high priceĭating app con artists typically overwhelm their victims with affection and praise – a term known as “love bombing” – to lure them in, before quickly asking to go off-platform to messengers like WhatsApp, Kik and Google Hangouts. Happn declined to share data on the number of scam reports on its app. Age also plays a big role, with romance fraud among 65-74-year-olds rising by 75% year-on-year. This supports wider data on romance scams: men were more likely to fall victim to a romance scam in 2022, says the UK’s Lloyds Bank. Her team has also built a photo database to index images frequently used for catfishing on happn, the majority of scammers use pictures of attractive women to hook in male targets.
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