By Sandeep Kasalkar
An online romance scam is a type of cybercrime in which criminals create a fictitious but often extremely detailed and convincing online identity that includes a name, location, photograph, profession, and other details. The scammer joins a dating site or social media platform as the imposter they’ve created, sometimes targeting an unsuspecting person’s cryptocurrency. These crypto scammers form a relationship with their target person and pretend to fall in love with them, gaining their trust and then robbing them of their cryptocurrency. This can amount to their entire life savings for some romance scam victims.
As you might expect, this type of fraudster is not looking for a relationship at all. The scammer usually wants money, and they may want it in cryptocurrency. These relationships typically continue online, and the romance ends when the abused person realizes it’s all a scam and cuts off their perpetrator. Because the victim’s actions are usually voluntary, there is far less recourse for justice than in most theft or crime. Unfortunately, romance scams account for 24% of all social media fraud and are becoming more prevalent.
Victims of Dating and Romance Scams: Social Engineering
Social engineering attacks include dating and romance scams. Their methods rely on psychological manipulation tactics to exploit human vulnerabilities rather than technical hacking prowess to exploit structural weaknesses in a network or computer code.
Many romance scammers also work in groups, with each member of the group performing a different behind-the-scenes function. Team members could, for example, assist the original perpetrator by pretending to work at a bogus cryptocurrency exchange help desk or customer service department, ostensibly to assist the victim in reclaiming their cryptocurrency. Other romance scammer techniques include impersonating a friend or relative of the perpetrator who is ill and in need of money, and so on.
The scammer has most likely spent time and effort researching their victim on dating apps or other forms of social media. They’re only interested in stealing as much money as they can from a victim, so they’ll often take their time and maintain the relationship as long as the target is sending crypto.
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