Romance scams: lucrative fraud is on the rise

Romance scams are crimes that occur on the Internet.  These types of crimes are on the rise and are appealing for perpetrators since they are lucrative and relatively easy to commit.  According to the FBI, victims tend to be elderly divorced or widowed women who are targeted by criminal organizations.  The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) states that romance scams, also known as confidence fraud result in the highest amount of financial losses to victims compared with other Internet-based crimes.  Often times, romance fraudsters say that they are in the building or construction industry working on projects outside of the United States.

“The Internet makes this type of crime easy because you can pretend to be anybody you want to be.  You can be anywhere in the world and victimize people.  The perpetrators will reach out to a lot of people on various networking sites to find somebody who may be a good target.  Then they use what the victims have on their profile pages and try to work those relationships and see which ones develop,” says Special Agent Christine Beining – a financial fraud investigator with the FBI.

In 2016, the IC3 received about 15,000 complaints regarding romance scams or confidence fraud.  Losses pertaining to these complaints surpassed $230 million.  The states with highest number of victims were: California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania.

For more information about the prevalence of romance scams visit: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/romance-scams




Comments

  1. SMSChicaAugust 9, 2017 at 4:32 AM

    It's like s Lifetime movie! These things happen all the time, so sad...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steven GilchristDecember 15, 2018 at 12:21 PM

    Thank you for reading this essay. You are right, we have to be aware of these types of fraud schemes. Please stay vigilant.
    -Steven Gilchrist

    ReplyDelete

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