Take your bad romance elsewhere

The RCMP reports that the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre received 1,249 complaints of romance scams in 2021. That doesn’t count the victims who were too embarrassed to report what had happened to them. The total amount lost over those 1,249 complaints? Fifty million dollars. Most of us have been targeted by a romance scammer through social media or email. It starts with a friendly message or simple connection request from a stranger. You click on their profile, they appear to be legit, maybe they even have some interests in common with you. But look a little closer. Do you have any friends in common? How did they come across your profile? Do they have more than a dozen posts on their page or is it something new that they just set up? Is their profile a common name with an underscore and string of numbers? Most people come up with a more unique and individual profile handle. If it looks like a name that a robot could have generated, you should see red flags waving. Most victims of romance scams tend to be people who don’t use social media often. Maybe they don’t even use their email very much. So when someone starts an online friendship with them, they are easily duped. And the scammers are getting smarter. They will create profiles using stock photos of good looking people, male or female. Once they make a connection with a target, they explain that they travel a great deal for work or they live many miles away, so they can’t possibly meet in person (this last part could be very true, by the way. Your scammer is quite often part of an organized crime ring in somewhere like Nigeria). After a few weeks or even months of cultivating a romance online, when they feel their target is sufficently involved in the relationship, the scammer will pull the trigger and ask for money. They will say they need it for a medical emergency for someone in their family, or even to pay for a travel visa so that they can come and meet their online sweetheart, and start a new life together. I have never been in a position to fall for one of these schemes, but I have accused real people of being scammers in my paranoid skepticism. And I have met a victim of a romance scam, a nice farmer in the States, who rarely used his computer. When he did, he met someone via email who used my photo and name to con him out of tens of thousands of dollars, all in the name of love. -30-