The season of holiday cheer is also the peak time for scammers offering bogus romance. Thousands of Americans looking for a new love to help usher in the new year will instead be beguiled by online con artists who use fake identities and empty promises to talk the lovestruck out of their savings — or worse.
While the top targets in 2020 were people 40 to 69 years old, the Federal Trade Commission said in February, the number of reported victims rose in every age group.
Consumers reported more than 30,000 of these scams to the FTC in 2020, three times as many as in 2016, with losses quadrupling to $304 million. The median loss was $2,500.
Are we growing more gullible? Who knows? What we do know is that the pandemic has been a blessing to scammers, helping them woo their marks from a distance and accelerating the growth in these crimes.
Romance scammers prowl around any territory where people search for love or just try to connect with strangers. That includes dating services and hookup sites, but also social media networks, where about half the scams in recent years have originated.
A key part of the con is the scammer’s ability to pretend to be someone he or she isn’t.
Some ventures, such as the matchmaking site EHarmony, attempt to head off problems by preventing people from trolling the site for victims. They require users to fill out extensive profiles, then use that information to decide who can connect with whom on the site. Still, even on sites and social…
