The fraudster and the 66-year-old victim met on Facebook in March 2021 and became friends. He gained the woman's trust through conversations.

The fraudster posed as an American soldier stationed in Libya. Since he wanted to go on vacation, he asked the woman for a total of 2,000 euros - the injured party transferred this to the fraudster in two transactions in April 2022. When the woman from Hamm noticed that the money had gone into an account in Italy, she reported the fraud to the police.

The police generally advise not to transfer money to people you have never seen or met in person. There are a lot of scammers on the Internet in particular who want to make money off the good faith of those around them. ( Source )

Romance Scam – Detect and Prevent!

Attractive men on Facebook who write to you out of the blue: Many women are familiar with the phenomenon. But behind the supposedly sudden love there is a tough business ploy: Romance Scam.

The word “scam” means “to deceive” in German. Literally, this is about romance scammers: Facebook profiles that pretend to be a young man, usually an American, who is in military service, has “stumbled upon” a profile and is interested in the user’s profile. However, after a short time the interest shifts more towards financial matters.

These first cover letters, mostly in English, are very similar. Here is an example that a user sent us:

“Hello beautiful.
I was very bored so I just thought of a beautiful name and decided to add. Fortunately, I found you and decided to tell you my intention, hoping for a good correspondence between us.”

That sounds unusual at first, but harmless. He was bored, thought of a nice name, found the user's name and wrote a friend request.

The person is also very polite in the following dialogues.

“I never meant to invade your privacy. I'm very glad and honored to meet you here. I'm Miles Miller from San Jose California. United States"

So he feels honored and is happy that the user is writing to him. You'd think this would seem like a very lonely person, so let's take a quick look at the friends list.

Distinguishing feature #1: The friends list

Scam via Facebook / Screenshot mimikama.org
Screenshot mimikama.org

Lonely looks different: Such profiles have a full friend list of between 100 and 300 people, at least 95% of which are women, mostly middle-aged. The female friends are often from different parts of the USA, often also from Asia.

Distinguishing feature No. 2: He is a soldier

There are countless images of US soldiers posting selfies on various social platforms. Romance scammers often use this huge pool to make their profile appear authentic. In addition, someone who serves as a US soldier apparently automatically comes across as serious and honest to many women.

Screenshot mimikama.org
Screenshot mimikama.org

Distinctive feature #3: Things get emotional

While female fake profiles get straight to the point with male users (SEX), romance scammers take a more subtle approach: They quickly tell a touching story in the course of a chat:

“I'm a single father of a lovely son, l lost my wife and my lovely daughter 5 years ago in a ghastly motor accident when my son was 9years old and my daughter 7 years old, since then l have been going through emotional pain .”

Basically, these scammers have a small child and are single parents. In this way, there is also an emphasis on pity, like “This handsome young man, who lost his wife so early, is in the military and takes care of his child!”

Distinguishing feature #4: He's in Africa

US soldiers are stationed all over the world. So it will come as no surprise that a scammer will say during a chat that they are currently stationed in Africa. This is important in order to make the scammer's following actions appear credible!

Distinctive feature #5: He needs money

At this point at the latest, affected users should break off contact at all levels.
Because it starts with small amounts, but increases! In a recent case that a user described to us, the man wanted 200 pounds so he could talk to her on the phone.
Surprise, the money was supposed to go to a Western Union account in Africa. In fact, the user and the scammer had previously spoken via Google Hangouts, and she noticed two things: 1. He always had problems turning on his webcam
2. He had an African accent

But it gets even worse: In subsequent cases, larger sums are demanded because he usually wants to get out of the military in order to move in with the user with his son.

The scammer becomes more demanding

On our advice, the user blocked the scammer on Facebook, but that wasn't the end of it!
She also had contact with him on Google Hangouts and apparently he was getting a lot of information about her because surprisingly her phone rang and he called her directly and asked why she had blocked him.

Screenshot mimikama.org
Screenshot mimikama.org

Where do these romance scammers come from?

These people are not isolated people, but actually part of a more or less organized crime group, the so-called “ Nigeria Connection ”.
These are groups of African fraudsters. Some of these scammers also live in Europe and others in Nigeria and specialize in credit card fraud, document forgery and much more. specialized.

How do I behave if I have been cheated on?

  • Break off contact and use the options available to block a scammer.
  • If you have already responded to the fraudsters' demands, they will be very persistent: therefore, consistently ignore any further attempts to contact them.
  • Save all correspondence with the fraudsters and keep all transfer receipts etc.
  • Contact your police in confidence and file a criminal complaint.


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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )