DUTCHNEWS.NL – Aug 20 – Some 37K people who lost money on fake dating sites will share €9M in compensation agreed by the company behind the sites. The sites operated by The Right Link allowed users to exchange messages with potential dates, costing between 60c and €1 a time. But many of the people posing as dates worked for the company and had been told to keep people in conversation for as long as possible. Some users lost thousands of euros through the scam. The ACM raided the company's premises last year and a number of sites including flirten.nl were taken down.
Category: Scammer
FBI Issues Cyber Alert as Organized Criminals Drive Dating Site Fraud up 70%
FORBES – Aug 5 – The FBI has issued a warning for Americans to be wary of romance scams, after the Bureau saw a 70% annual rise in reported fraud, where dating sites were used to trick victims into sending money, purchasing items or even laundering or muling money for people met online. In 2018, ~18K complaints were received with losses totalling ~$362M. And, for every reported incident there will be others where victims don't come forward.
How Facebook Romance Scam Ended up With Tragedy
NEW YORK TIMES – July 30 – Renee Holland befriended a soldier on Facebook and sent him thousands of dollars. She became entwined in a global fraud that Facebook and the US military appear helpless to stop. Many scammers operate from their phones in Nigeria and other African nations, working several victims at the same time. Facebook has become a one-stop shop. It has plenty of photos of American service members. Creating an impostor account can be easy. Facebook groups for single women and widows are full of targets. To her friends and family, Ms. Holland was known as trusting and impulsive. She sent her Facebook friend money for airfare, partly with credit cards, without her husband's knowledge. He never showed up. The Hollands lost $26K to $30K. Mr. Holland was arrested on domestic violence charges in August 2018. On Dec. 23, 2018, he shot and killed Renee and her father at their new home. Mr. Holland then turned the gun on himself. There are no exact figures on how many service members and civilians have been affected. The F.B.I. said it received ~18,500 complaints from victims of romance or similar internet scams last year, with reported losses exceeding $362M, up 71% from 2017. Facebook said it constantly removes impostor accounts.
BBC to Launch a New TV Show “For Love or Money”
Dating Industry Executives Discuss Best Practices in Safety
The webinar, "Online Safety in the Dating and Social Entertainment Market", was hosted by Northland Capital Markets. Participating from the dating industry were Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group, Casey Burton, Director and Senior Counsel at Match Group, and Jeronimo Folgueira, CEO of Spark Networks.
Representing the panel from various safety and online standards organizations were Larry Magid, CEO of Connect Safely, Stephen Balkam, CEO and Founder of the Family Online and Safety Institute, and George Kidd, CEO of the Online Dating Association.
"We put safety at the core of everything we do," said Geoff Cook, CEO of The Meet Group. "Our users are here to interact and connect – and we think the goal of a safety operation is to promote a safe environment free of bullying, hate speech, and abuse to encourage making meaningful connections."
Topics covered during the discussion included: the current state of online safety, content moderation and law enforcement, working with the app store partners, how technology can help users feel safer, and strategies for building a safer online community.
While safety will always be a major focus in the dating industry, Larry Magid, CEO of Connect Safely, wanted to set the record straight in two specific areas.
"One observation is that between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s, while Internet usage was on a steep rise, violence, both against children and sexual violence in general, has gone down," said Magid. "So anybody who wants to correlate online dating with increased sexual violence is actually looking at the numbers in exactly the wrong way. So while I can't claim data that shows that online dating has made things safer, I can say that during the period that online dating has risen, violence has gone down."
"The other thing to understand is that nobody can guarantee 100% safety on anything, whether it's food safety or transportation safety, or safety using tools," he added. "Nobody can ever say with absolute certainty that nothing bad is going to happen. What we can do is have best practices in an industry (like online dating) – and we can have consumer education."
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The Meet Group to Participate in Safety Panel Discussion
Queer Dating Apps Are Unsafe by Design
NEW YORK TIMES – June 20 – In 2016, the Pew Research Center found that use of online dating apps among young adults had tripled in three years. The rates are higher among queer people. The frequency with which queer people using social media and mobile dating apps amplifies the privacy concerns we face compared with the general population. 15% of gay and bisexual men who use geosocial dating apps report that someone has shared their intimate images without their consent. Catfishing and revenge porn are common on queer dating platforms. The problem isn't sharing intimate selfies. The problem is the law permits the development of apps that are unsafe by design. Tort law, the regime we use to seek damages from harassers, has been ineffectual because many courts look at gay people sharing selfies and conclude that they gave up their privacy the moment they clicked "send." We've only just introduced a federal revenge porn bill. Communications Decency Act Section 230 immunizes digital platforms from most legal liability associated with the bad behavior of their users.
Alaska Tops the States With the Most Romance Scams
USA TODAY – June 14 – HighSpeedInternet.com has issued a new report "When Love Bites," in which the Internet service provider comparison website identified the states where singles are most likely to fall prey to romance scammers. Alaska turns out to be the state where they are most likely to be catfished, based on data from the 2018 FBI Internet Crime Report, and U.S. Census population estimates. Nevada, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Colorado round out the next most likely states. The BBB has reported that online romance schemes cost victims as much as $1B over a three-year period.
Dating App Scammers Could Be Spotted by AI
BBC – May 31 – Scammers who use dating sites to trick people into handing over cash can be spotted using artificial intelligence, research suggests. A neural network has analysed profiles, messages and images from real dating data to get better at spotting fakes. It sampled age, gender and ethnicity as well as the language people use to describe themselves. The system proved accurate at spotting scammers and fakes in 93% of cases. Computer scientists in the UK, US and Australia collaborated on the AI-based system, which found that those making fake profiles were more likely to be men (60%) and had an average age of 50.
Scammers Use Dating Apps to Fleece Millions From Aussie Women
CANSTAR – Apr 29 – ~118K Aussies were swindled out of $107M in 2018, marking a new record in the amount of financial loss reported to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC) Scamwatch website and phone helpline in one year. It is also an 18% increase over the $90.9M in financial loss Scamwatch reported in 2017. Dating and romance scams were the second most financially damaging with losses of $24.6M. Women reported losing most to dating and romance scams with $19.5M in losses, while men were most affected by investment scams, reporting losses of $29.1M.