NEW YORK (WABC) — Valentine’s Day is this Saturday, and you may be looking for love, but along with your search, watch out for a very sophisticated scam.
According to a recent survey by cybersecurity company McAfee, one in four Americans reports interacting a fake profile or AI-generated bot in the last year.
7 On Your Side’s Nina Pineda has the new red flags you may be getting romance scammed.
After meeting on a popular dating app, the man who Jules, who didn’t want to use her last name, had been connecting with over text asked her to invest in Bitcoin.
“I found a fella who I thought was a good-looking guy,” Jules said.
The same thing happened to Jacqueline Crenshaw, a successful Connecticut executive, with a different gentleman using a stolen image who got her to invest in crypto.
“He was telling me I was making all this profit, that’s what encouraged me to invest more,” Crenshaw said.
In the beginning, both were able to withdraw earnings from their digital wallet that their online interest set up, eventually sending more and more before realizing it was all a ruse.
Crenshaw said she lost close to $1 million and Jules lost nearly $80,000 in the end.
“These are very persuasive techniques to scam people, I don’t want people feeling any sense of shame about it,” New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Sam Levine said.
The new commissioner of the DCWP warns that victims are being convinced their investments are blowing up.
“They will send people statements that look like very official financial statements,” Levine said. “Those are easy to falsify.”
“I went to go and withdraw the funds again, then they completely froze the account for money laundering,” Jules said. “It was all a setup; it was all a scam.”
Pretending to be someone else and using their image to lure victims into a relationship is called catfishing.
The company Social Catfish put out a list of the 100 most catfished photos.
Their photos have been stolen, appearing dozens or hundreds of times across various dating websites, on Facebook, even on LinkedIn, which is why it’s important to use a reverse image search.
Download a photo, drop it into the search bar in Google, and see what comes back.
In many cases you will see the same image with different names, and different countries, posted on different dating sites all over the world. Some of those men came forward and allowed us to use their image to warn others. Their pictures had been used for over 15 years.
“If you cannot physically see their face, do not proceed; that’s the biggest mistake I made,” Crenshaw said.
Your biggest red flags are if your romantic interest refuses to meet in person, if they want cash, Bitcoin, or crypto, or if they ask to communicate off the dating app.
Signing up for a plan like McAfee’s Scam Protector can help keep you safe by blocking thousands of malicious messages from ever reaching you.
The FTC says romance scams rank as the number one in total losses, so the investment of a few dollars a month is worth it.
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