Some use a day like Valentine’s Day to lurk around on profiles looking to con innocent people longing for love.
HOUSTON — Many people are celebrating love on Valentine’s Day, but on the flip side, some people are using love to target those eager to find it.
Between January 2023 and January of this year, cyber security experts saw a 2,087% increase in bot attacks on dating apps. They said romance scams usually spike on Valentine’s Day.
A company called One Rep said with 57 million people using dating apps in the U.S., romance scams are on the rise.
Some use a day like Valentine’s Day to lurk around on profiles looking to con innocent people longing for love.
OneRep.com is a web scrubbing company that offers free scans so you can do your homework on someone you have connected with online dating before you share personal information like finances with them.
OneRep.com said frauds who were trying to finesse money from men call it “pig butchering.” This means targeting men on these dating sites and using a woman to start a virtual relationship, slowly gaining their trust and convincing them to transfer money in crypto or bitcoin.
In 2022, nearly 70,000 people reported falling victim to romance scams to the Federal Trade Commission with a total of $1.3 billion in losses.
“There are stories where this goes up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars because at the end of it, the root cause of these romance scams is we all want to find love and we are vulnerable to it,” said Mark Kapczynski, senior vice president of strategic partnerships at One Rep.
They said simple things like a Google search before sharing personal information with a potential online date could go a long way. Taking the person’s photo and running it through Google’s reverse image service to see if it shows up across a thousand sites indicating if the person is fake or real.
Kapczynski said Valentine’s Day isn’t the only day con artists strike.
“Valentine’s Day certainly, but you’ll also have things like Veteran’s Day (and) right around New Years,” he said. “Just every holiday kind of presents its own unique thing or opportunity for fraudsters. Sadly, this isn’t just it will pass after Valentine’s Day.”
He said don’t forget to read the tips, tricks, and how to stay safe section on dating site apps to navigate potential red flags. Also, according to CBS, look for things like formal or non-conversational messages, if the information isn’t consistent that’s also a red flag.
- If the information isn’t consistent that’s also a red flag.
- Things like personality and tone change.
- Look for pictures that don’t look real and odd patterns, such as what time they message you.
- Lastly, researchers state people between the ages of 51 and 60 are typically most likely to fall for these scams so just beware.
Just last year, two Houston-area men were sentenced to federal prison for swindling money from several elderly women in our area using romance to tug on their heartstrings.
