Money Sense: Romance Scams

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This month in Money Sense, we’d like to highlight scams, specifically Romance Scams.  This is a type of scam we unfortunately see quite often, affecting customers both male and female and all age groups.  The article below was recently featured on AARP’s website and offers great information on what to look for to avoid being scammed or taken advantage of. 

Any time someone you don’t PERSONALLY know asks you to send them money, that should be a red flag!  Also, NEVER give out your personal information, banking information or online banking user names and passwords.  If you find yourself in this or any situation where someone you have not personally met asks you to send them cash, gift cards or take money to a 3^rd party including bitcoin ATM’s, talk to your bank first, call the police station or even a trusted friend before sending ANY money!  In most cases, once you send a fraudster your hard earned money, it’s impossible to get it back and you take the financial loss.

According to AARP, adults of all ages go online in hopes of finding love and companionship. Three in 10 U.S. adults have used a dating website or app, including 1 in 5 Americans ages 50 to 64, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. But seeking romantic connection online can have a major downside. Cyberspace is full of scammers eager to take advantage of lonely hearts.

The scam can work something like this: You post a dating profile and up pops a promising match — good-looking, smart, funny and personable. This potential mate claims to live in another part of the country or to be abroad for business or a military deployment. But he or she seems smitten and eager to get to know you better, and suggests you move your relationship to a private channel like email, text or a chat app.

Over weeks or months you feel yourself growing closer. You make plans to meet in person, but something always comes up for your new love and they are unable to meet. Then you get an urgent request–there’s an emergency (for example, a medical problem or a business crisis) and your online companion needs you to send money fast, typically via gift cards, prepaid debit cards or a wire transfer. They’ll promise to pay you back, but that will never happen. Instead, they will keep asking for more until you realize it’s a scam and cut them off.

Social media is also an increasingly active outlet for phony suitors to seek their marks, reaching out to people they spot on Facebook or Instagram. The number of complaints about romance scams fielded by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) leaped from 11,235 in 2016 to 52,593 in 2020, and reported losses topped $300 million, a nearly fourfold increase over the same period.

Romance scams can overlap with or evolve into other forms of fraud. For example, international criminal gangs use dating sites to recruit unwitting “money mules” to launder ill-gotten funds through their bank accounts or other means. In September 2021, the FBI reported a rising trend of sham sweethearts enticing their targets to make fraudulent cryptocurrency investments.

The older the target, the heavier the financial toll, according to the FTC — the median individual loss from a romance scam for people 70 and over was $9,475, compared to $2,500 across all age groups.

Here are some warning signs to watch for:

• Your new romantic interest sends you a picture that looks more like a model from a fashion magazine than an ordinary snapshot.
• The person quickly wants to leave the dating website and communicate with you through email or instant messaging.
• He or she lavishes you with attention. Swindlers often inundate prospective marks with texts, emails and phone calls to draw them in.
• He or she repeatedly promises to meet you in person but always seems to come up with an excuse to cancel.

Remember to take these online relationships at a slow pace. Ask your potential partner a lot of questions and watch for inconsistencies that might reveal an impostor. Check the profile photo they use through Google’s “search by image” feature. If the same picture shows up elsewhere with a different name attached to it, that’s a sign a scammer may have stolen it. Be wary of flirtatious and overly complimentary emails. You can paste the text into a search engine and see whether the same words show up on websites devoted to exposing romance scams.

If you begin to suspect the suitor may be a swindler, cut off contact immediately and notify the dating site or the dating app on which you met the scammer.

Some additional things to consider: 

• Don’t feel a false sense of safety because you’re the one who made first contact. Scammers flood dating websites with fake profiles and wait for victims to come to them.
• Don’t reveal too much personal information in a dating profile or to someone you’ve chatted with only online. Scammers can exploit details like your last name or where you work to manipulate you or to commit identity theft.
• Don’t ever give an online acquaintance intimate photos that could later be used for extortion.
• Don’t send cash or gift cards to someone you’ve chatted with only online or put money on a reloadable debit card for the person — you’ll never get it back.

If you would like more information on Romance Scams, feel free to contact the team at West Gate Bank in Bellevue, or you can reach out to me directly at 402.291.0889 or via email at [email protected]. As a full-service bank, West Gate Bank is large enough to serve all of your banking needs, yet small enough to provide the outstanding personal service that only a community bank can deliver. At West Gate Bank, our interest is you!