Romance scams, the Yahoo boys and my friend Beth

[Gerald]

Scammers often pretend to be military men.

You may well think you'd never fall for a romance scam, that they're cheesy, inauthentic and very obviously after your cash. But security experts have warned that there's been an increase in all sorts of online fraud during the coronavirus pandemic.

It happened to my friend Beth.

One day she mentioned that she had met a man online who was in the military. She thought it was a neat coincidence, because my partner is also in the armed forces. But the more she told me, the louder the alarm bells rang.

Despite being deployed on a "top secret mission" in a highly dangerous part of the world, "Alexander" managed to message Beth all the time. He was handsome, charming and affectionate.

When she showed me a photo, my heart sank. Alexander's uniform and rank didn't match the role he said he had or the unit he said he was in. There was no reason for him to be in the place where he claimed to be.

He was almost certainly not the man in the photo.

'He could be anyone, anywhere'

Faking it

wondered how the real people in the photos the scammers were using would feel if they knew, and I then got a small taste of it myself when someone set up a fake Instagram account using my pictures, and started messaging people - mainly men I believe - saying it was my "secret" space.

Akinola Bolaji agreed to be interviewed by the New York Times and said he was a former romance scammer.

Mr Nicas tracked Ms Holland's scammer down to Nigeria - where romance scammers are rife. There young men work sometimes in groups, sometimes individually, and pretend to be both men and women online.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53445690

In dating and the jungle that goes on in scam, there is a billion industry going on around the clock. Some lonely vulnerable people get rid of their assets by people without conscience and moral limitations, and who need to be isolated from reality ... maybe on a desert island..with a pile of bananas and coconuts as punishment ... and it still becomes a very mild punishment otherwise they get jail time and big damages especially if they are extradited to the US or similar.