Scammers will attempt anything to get hold of your hard-earned cryptocurrency, and the latest trick of choice seems to be the Romance Fraudless often referred to as Pig-Butchering
Romance frauds are nearly always conducted online rather than in person, with the criminal creating a false persona and feigning love and affection towards the victim, hoping to create a fake relationship in which only one party knows it is all a lie. The criminals will go to great lengths to persuade and convince the victim that they are in a loving relationship; manipulating and exploiting them over often a lengthy period of time. The culmination of the efforts made by the scammer is usually a request to their ’lover’ for money, or increasingly, cryptocurrency to pay for an emergency or a temporary loan to make a purchase that will benefit the ‘couple’.
In the USA, the Internet Crime Complaint Centre IC3 reported recorded instances of romance scams doubling from 2020 to 2021. Meanwhile in the UK, Action Fraud have reported total losses of ?68 Million due to this type of scam in the latest figures available.
There have been high profile and eye-wateringly large losses reported by victims recently, such as the case of a UK woman being defrauded of ?113,000 by a man she met on an online dating app; or the Father and Daughter from Tenessee who were duped out of a mixture of inheritance and life savings totalling $290,000.
The fraudsters are not doing anything new; confidence and romance scams have been around for as long as records can be traced, however they are becoming increasingly clever and manipulative with their methods. The wealth of data available at the push of a button online means that criminals find it increasingly easy to learn everything about their victims before they have even made contact. Added to the fact that they can create imaginative and believable cover stories much easier in the digital age than would have been possible in years gone by when they would have had to meet and target their victims in person.
Points to be mindful of to avoid becoming victim of a romance fraud:
- Be wary of the amount of information you make available to the public online. confidence fraudsters will use every shred of information to endear themselves to you and will alter their persona to become a ‘perfect match’ with you.
- Verify that the person you are interacting with online is who they say they are; this can be using video calls, or performing reverse image searches online to see whether their pictures are genuine and unique, or stolen from the internet in a rudimentary identity theft.
- Never send money or cryptocurrency to anybody that you have not met in person.
- Always be wary of unsolicited approaches online. Treat everyone with suspicion!
The ease in which a would-be-fraudster can study and plan their attack, coupled with the decentralised and harder to trace medium of cryptocurrency as a means of theft, mean that these scams are likely to become more common place and increase in value, unless education and awareness can be spread widely.
