You’re going to want to swipe left on these dating-app scams
Lesson summary
Hi there everybody, welcome to Plain English, where we help you upgrade your skills in English with current events and trending topics. Today is Thursday, June 24, 2021 and this is lesson 375. JR is the producer and he has posted the full lesson at PlainEnglish.com/375.
Coming up today: Scams on dating apps are on the rise. We’ll talk about three common scams you might encounter on dating apps, including one shocking scam that can cause the victim—yes, the victim—to be prosecuted. As always, we review a common English expression, and this one is really common—”raise a red flag.” And JR has a song of the week. Let’s get going.
Dating app scams on the rise
Scams on the internet are as old as, well, the internet itself. We’ve all gotten emails proposing lucrative business deals and other unsavory things. But as people become more aware of typical internet scams, the scammers have to up their game: they need to work a little harder to cheat people out of money. And they are finding a lucrative new battleground: dating apps.
There are a lot of different dating app scams, but we’ll talk about three versions today. I’ll give you two now, and save the really shocking one for later. The first scam is an investment scam; the second one is a hardship scam.
In the investment scam, the fraudster poses as a successful businessperson or investor. To build their credibility, the scammers might send screenshots showing high account balances and profitable trades.
After building trust, the scammer has a few options. One option is to simply offer to make an investment on behalf of the other person. Send me $2,000, the scammer might say, and I’ll make an investment for you just like the one that was so successful for me. Since I trust you, I’d be willing to do that as a favor. You’ll definitely make money, the scammer says.
Another option is to pretend to have some short-term cash flow problems. If the scammer said he was a successful businessperson, he might say he needs $5,000 right away to avoid losing a customer—and that he’ll get the money back in a few days. He’s already sent bank balance screenshots showing a high net worth—what’s the harm?
In both these cases, the money is gone as soon as the victims send it, and the scam usually ends there.
Hardship scams can be a lot more dangerous for the victims. Again after building trust for a few days or even a few months, scammers say they need money for some reason. A common example is travel: the person is from your city but is temporarily living far away. The scammers might say they’re serving in the military or, bizarrely, working on an oil rig. To get home, they just need a few thousand dollars for the plane ticket. In other cases, the scammers say they having a hard time paying for medical bills, or they’re in legal trouble, or their car broke down , or any other reason they might need money right away.
Hardship scams are dangerous because they can go on for a long time: the scammer can always invent another reason he needs just a little bit more money. And they’re master manipulators: with enough practice, they know exactly what to say to make the victims feel bad and open their wallets.
One victim from the UK said she lost her entire savings, £40,000, to a romance scammer. It started with a £500 veterinary bill and escalated from there. Another victim lost £115,000. The person she had been talking to for months told her he had been kidnapped by loan sharks in Ukraine, the capstone of an elaborate months-long ruse. She panicked and sent the money: she thought she was saving his life.
But neither the hardship nor the investment scams can send the victim to jail. That’s right: the victim of a dating app scam can be the one who goes to jail. The newest dating app scam makes the victim a mule: it’s a way for criminal organizations to launder money. A criminal organization that needs to move money across borders wants to obscure the movement of that money as much as possible. So they find credulous victims on dating apps to move the money for them.
Here’s how it works: the scammer tells the victim that they need to transfer money to a foreign bank account. But for some bureaucratic reason, they’re having a hard time making the transfer, maybe because they’re overseas. So they ask the victim, can I send money to you, and you can then send it back to me, but to my other account? The victims don’t think twice about it. It sounds like a strange request, but if someone sends me $5,000 and I send $5,000 back to his other account, the victims wonder, what harm is done?
A lot of harm is done, if that money is illegal. Banks have to follow strict regulations and certain types of transactions raise red flags to governments or banks themselves. But the criminal organizations know what kinds of transactions raise suspicion. And they also know how to manipulate their victims into laundering the money for them. They convince the victims to move the money around in a way that will escape regulators’ notice. But if regulators do notice, then the victim can be charged with money laundering.
One woman in Australia said she thought she was dating a US Army official. But instead, she was tricked into laundering over $150,000 in money for organized crime. The “official” told her he had inherited the money, but that he didn’t have a bank account. He needed someone to hold the money for him. So he convinced the woman to take possession of the money, and then send it to other bank accounts in smaller amounts. That woman wasn’t prosecuted—but the Australian government says she could have been.
Dating app scams of all types are on the rise and the pandemic has made the problem worse for two reasons. One, people were stuck inside, isolated from their friends and support networks. That made them more likely to believe a scammer’s story; they were craving interaction and love, and it was easier for scammers to play with their emotions.
The other reason is that meeting in person, in public, is the first defense against falling for an online dating scam. But the pandemic provided a ready-made excuse for scammers to delay the first meeting. They could always say they were afraid of contracting Covid, or that they were stuck outside the country and couldn’t return home. Some even arranged to meet on a first date, only to cancel at the last minute, citing a positive Covid test.
The UK said romance scams are up 20 percent from prior to the pandemic. The US government tracks losses from all types of online scams: the numbers they report are certainly just a fraction of what is truly lost. Still, in 2020, the Federal Trade Commission said Americans lost $304 million to romance scams, up 50 percent from the previous year. The median loss was over $2,500.
You might think it’s just older people who fall victim to dating app scams. But the fastest growing segment of victims is people aged 20 to 29.
Just doing it for the money
The first time I became aware of a scam like this was a long article in the New York Times from a few years back ; I’ll link to it in the transcript. The reporters found the scammer in Nigeria; they contacted him by phone and even went to his house. And the scammer said he was very poor and was just doing it for the money.
The BBC interviewed—anonymously—someone who ran a dating app scam from jail. He used his own photos to match with older women he thought were lonely and neglected on the platform. He looked for specific keywords that signaled someone’s vulnerability and ability to pay. Older female lawyers looking for happiness, he said, were perfect. He convinced people to send him small amounts of money at a time , scamming at least one woman out of £10,000, just £100 or £200 at a time.
The shocking thing is that he said it was just work; he wasn’t emotionally involved in this at all. To him, it was just about problem solving. How do I find the right target, say the right words, and ask for the money?
Learn English the way it’s really spoken
