Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2014; the numbers and examples of the romance scam it describes date from then, although the tactics are still common.
Although the total number of victims and the total amount stolen are unknown, because many women are too ashamed to report it, people are already talking about millions of dollars and hundreds of women scammed every year. In two specific cases, women have been cheated out of $250,000 and $300,000.
This is the new speciality of Nigerian fraudsters operating from Malaysia, made possible by the internet, the ease of opening a bank account to receive international transfers and the country’s lack of resources.
As a rule, their victims are middle-aged women, although the most profitable profile for them is the middle-aged widow.
They contact them through the most popular dating websites and pose as a handsome Western man, a businessman or someone with an important job who travels a lot, but who wants to settle down and, above all, find the love of his life.
With patience and a sophisticated line of talk, they court these women and make them fall in love, until the women feel they have finally found the man of their lives, the man who will fill the void of loneliness. After talking for some time, whether by email, chat or even on the phone, the two decide that the moment has come to take the plunge and spend their lives together.
Once the scammer is sure the woman is truly in love, he tells her he has run into a problem in an Asian country (usually Malaysia) and cannot leave unless he pays a sum of money that, for him, is not large at all, but his access to his bank accounts has been blocked.
Often they even send a forged document that perfectly imitates one from the US Embassy in Malaysia, or from the embassy of whichever European country is involved, and love does the rest. These women, short of affection and in many cases having been through tragedies such as the loss of their husbands, end up thinking: “Just when something good was finally happening in my life…”
In the end they pay between $10,000 and $25,000, although sometimes the scam is even more elaborate: the scammer poses as a consulate official who has been kidnapped for religious reasons in an Islamic country and will even be killed unless a hefty sum is paid. Would you let the love of your life die?
The problem is that these cons used to target very wealthy women, whereas now the scam has been refined to cheat women who cannot afford to lose that kind of money.
The latest victim was a 59-year-old widow from Arizona who, after sending him $30,000, said she travelled to Malaysia to look for him in person, but the love of her life never showed up.
The other most recent victim was a 50-year-old woman in the United States who sent all her savings ($300,000) to a man she met on the dating site Match.com, three years after her husband died. She says she genuinely fell in love; he said he was a businessman who, because of his work, had run into trouble with the embassy in Malaysia. She told Reuters that she thought her life was finally moving in a very positive direction after so much tragedy, and that something good had at last happened to her.
Cases like these are multiplying in Europe, where several women have already been cheated out of €25,000 and €15,000 this way, and in Canada and Australia. So it never hurts to remember to take extra care when looking for the love of your life on an online dating site: in trying to fill your life, you may end up with an empty wallet.
Further reading
- Watch out for the new, well-crafted scams doing the rounds online
- The virtual girlfriend who scammed a man out of $200,000
- The traits that make you the victim of a scam
Featured image: Internet Crime Complaint Center, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
