Dating Scams

Dating scams are on the increase. Scammers and fraudsters are targeting lonely singles on a daily basis using various techniques to dupe single people online. Internet dating for singles has exploded over the past few years. There are literally thousands of singles sites online today compared to a few years ago. New dating sites are springing up every day offering cheaper means of contacting other singles. with the rise in the number of people willing to use the Internet to meet other singles it is obvious more people are targetted by scammers.

The majority of scammers will operate through the vast number of free dating sites just because it is free! Free dating sites have very little if any means of verifying their members. All someone needs to join a free singles site is an email address. Nothing else! Naturally a scammer can hide behind an email address without any fear of being caught by authorities. The biggest scammers are the foreign women scammers from Russia whol usually copy of photo of a model from another site and use this to entice single foreign men. They will contact the men in the first instance saying they were attracted to his profile. A few emails will go back and forth and the scammer will quickly move to show her apparent love and affection for the man. She doesn't want to have to write for months on end and needs to end her scam as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Finance will then be brought into the correspondence and a hard luck story will ensue. She will tell her man that she has had an accident or a friend or family member has had an accident and she needs money to help her. Another scam is to say she wants to visit the man in his country and needs money to obtain a visa or prove she has funds to finance her trip. Once the man wires the money he wwill not here from the woman again as she moves onto her next victim!

It has been reported that Russian men pretend to be women on singles sites and manage to trick other men into sending them money! Russian male scammers are also pretending to be gay and are targeting gay singles sites and scamming foreign gay men using the techniques women use to scam men! The lesson here is NOT to send money to anyone you do not know in person. No decent single person is going to ask you for money.

Single women are not exempt from being scammed either. There are many men scammers looking for lonely vulnerable women to scam. They usually target women using business scams. They will spend some time gaining the confidence of a woman by building up a relationship through speaking on the phone and through emails. Eventually when they feel they have gained the trust of the woman they will introduce a business scam. This can take many forms from an opportunity to make a killing in a financial deal to financial help with an urgent business issue. They may explain they need money to stop the closure of their buisness, money to pay of a debt that will be covered by some future 'guaranteed' contract but the need money up front now and so on.

It is astonishing to read about the number of single men and women who have been tricked into parting with their money to professional scammers. Never give your money to people you have met online.