Romance Scammers in Dating Apps and Sites .

Madkhali, Hatim
Information Security, KSU 11041648

Romance Scammers in Dating Apps and Sites.

Hatim Madkhali
Kentucky State University, USA
hatim.madkhali@kysu.edu

Abstract

It can be clearly seen that we have reached a very high level of development in several
aspects in this life. One of these aspects that we have reached a massive improvement in is
technology. However, it is undeniable that good and bad things have been improving hand to
hand since ever. Thus, whatever system comes out of goodwill intent would make evil
people think of how could they use it in a bad way. The malicious intentions inside these
people make them do their best to keep pace with the development of technology. The
criminals we had in the past decided to keep pace with technology and use it; hence the use
and development of the word "cybercriminal," which took on a new meaning in today's
world. The enormous improvement of technology is incredibly stunning; it made technology
got almost into every single aspect of our lives. It is not only making people do daily life
activities using the internet but believe or don't that there are so many people use technology
to find their future soulmates. The technology invaded our lives with somethings called,
online dating sites. These online sites attract people to use it by granting them privacy and
diversity. These sites are allowed for anyone to use and among those who use it there is a
group of fraudulent cybercriminals whom we call "Scammers." These people use dating sites
to fool others and steal their money. This short paper presents some of the crooked ways that
scammers use and how we can secure ourselves from their danger.

1. Introduction

It is very common and very normal that anyone in the entire world is concerned about their
money; how to gain it, make it continuously increase and of course protect it from being
stolen or lost. Nowadays, we became more concerned about security more than ever before.
In this modern life, the security alarm is one of our best friends in our houses, companies,
banks and almost everywhere. Even in our computers and cell phones we use different kinds
of programs to protect our devices of any threat or risk. Not only that but also when we use
our credit cards and for online shopping, we never get bored answering the security questions
or waiting for a verification code to be sent to us. This great security we have today might be

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one of the reasons that led villains to look for new ways to do their evil desire of stealing
others’ money. Nowadays, we are dealing with new kind of thieves who will never put their
hands in your pocket or hack your bank account. This kind of criminals, somehow, will make
you send them your money by yourself. They do not use magic, nor they use hypnotism to do
so. These villains are called Scammers, and social engineering is their best way of stealing.
Due to the massive increase of using technology, a huge number of people use dating apps to
find their soulmates, and this created a new environment for scammers to entrap their
victims.

The romance scam on dating apps and websites took place just nine years ago in the UK, and
it cost 203 victims more than £5,000 while the total number of victims was 592 in 2007[1].
In 2012 Whitty and Buchanan estimated the number of casualties which has been fooled by
romance scammers by almost 230,000 persons in Britain alone [2]. The UK is not the only
country suffers from this romance scammers, the USA does as well. One of five relationships
in the USA takes place in one of these apps and sites [3]. The danger of this kind of scam is
that the scammers pretend to start a normal relationship using dating apps and websites while
their real intent is to con their victims out of money. Sexual temptation is the way scammers
use to victimize others. A fake picture of an attractive naked girl uses as a profile picture can
lead to a significant relationship or you can say to great prey in the eyes of the scammer. A
man may try to make a relationship with a girl with charmed profile picture, which is indeed
fake, believing that she is really whom he wants to meet, however, the scammer would do
their best to develop the relationship by sending a more fake picture to their victim [4].

2. Methodology

Understanding the question is half the answer. According to this, the most efficient way to
fight against any risk is to analyze every single aspect of this risk; where it comes from?
How could it affect me? And so on. Thus, fighting against romance scammers in dating sites
and apps requires us to be capable of recognizing and segregating scammers from others.
Therefore, we need to know the different kinds of messages that these cybercriminals usually
use in order to identify them and secure ourselves. There are many different ways that
scammers use to con their victims out of many.

2.1 Play on the victim’s emotions.

This a very common way that cybercriminals use. In this kind, once the scammer and his
victim start chatting, the scammer, who may claim that he is a US citizen living outside of
the US, will start telling his victim that he needs some help with money saying that he is
stuck abroad and need help to pay the flight cost. The scammer may also try to play on the

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victim’s emotion in another way asking for money to pay for hospital or funeral for one of
his family members, usually mother [5]. So many US citizens have reported that they have
conned out of money and lost thousands of dollars through this type of fraud [5]. The
anonymity that these sites and apps give to the users makes the victim unable to tell if the
sender is real or not. They can not even tell the age, material of status or even the gender of
the sender [5]. However, they are some signs that usually make us quite sure that the sender
is a scammer.

Firstly, cyber-criminal may try as much as they could to show good faith and tight
connection with God to make the victims believe that they are good people. [6] Thus, one of
the signs to know them is when you see words like “God”, “Praying”, “Pray”, “Thank God”
and so on [6]. For instance, they may send you something like this:

“You cannot imagine how much I prayed and asked God for sending me the partner
he meant for me during the last months. When I finally decided to surrender, not to
force anything, not taking any actions, you came into my life my dear, totally
unexpected” [6].

Secondly, they usually show that they are well-educated people, honest, clear and sincere.
They do this to make the victims trust them more as show the following examples shows [6].

“I will always remain honest and sincere to you, and i wish to inform you that, i was
married before with a daughter and i lost my wife, looking forward to hear from you
again...
 it something credible to say that am well encourage in having faith and
understanding with people around me. and i believe that you are such minded person
too.” [6].

“my position as engineer entitles me as, senior project surveyor monitoring in

building department. am a good engineering, good in drawing both computer
drawing and skilful drawing.” [6].

Additionally, and after showing how religious they are and how good they are, they may start
showing love and in interest in long relationships. They may ask to move the conversion to
another place, such as SMS or Yahoo Messenger to show the victims how special they are;
then they may start using words like “Honey”, “Baby”, and “Beloved”.

“I’ll be with you wherever you go, on the clouds on high, on the firm ground below.
I’ll be with you in unexpected ways, to guide you, to watch you, through all your days.
For you’re in my heart, and you’re in my mind, and I’m with you now and for all

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time. Every moment of every hour, of every day, for every reason imaginable, and in
every way, I need you, and I like you.” [6].

“All I want is for us to love each other for the rest of our lives, you can call me with
this number +447045702211 okay. i really want to have a word together
 Thanks.”
[6].

Not only this, but also they may claim that they have an extreme bad luck that has led them
to lose their flight back to the US or made them unable to pay the hotel invoice.

American: How’re you doing?


Scammer: I'm doing fine

American: Are you in Hawaii?


Scammer: Nope get hooked up with little problem here.

American: "Hooked up with a little problem?" Explain, please.

Scammer: You care to know? I don't think you can help me out of this mess.

American: Well..........tell me and we will see.

Scammer: My dad he's from us and my mum is from Spain. So I’m a honest lady. And
I’m trustworthy lady. And I don’t like people cheating. Right now I’m in West Africa.
There was a guy that I met when I’m still at home in Florida (two month ago) so the
guy told me that he love me. And I told him that I love him too. So he traveled to West
Africa. He called me and chat with me on the phone. He really felt in love with me. So
he said I should come and visit him in the hotel. So I went down to West Africa, to the
hotel and we meet each other in person. But I don’t really know that the guy doesn’t
love me. We have fun and know much more about each other together in the same
room. And the next day I can't find this guy any more he ran away with all my money
and my goods. All I need now...

American: All you need now?


Scammer: Your help. If you can help me to raise fund and I will pay you back when I
get back to the States.

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American: How much do you need? [5].

2.2 Do you want to see me naked?

While so many people think that scammers only use writing chatting, there are some
different ways that these scammers use. Another way that scammers use depends on sex and
there are many different ways to do this kind of fraud, such as virtual cam whores(VCW),
Cam-Girl and Sextortion [7]. In these types the scammers aim to make their victims go to a
video chat where they have pre-recorded video or some marionette that they can manipulated
by the scammers [7]. The scammers can control these puppets and make it do some moves
that make it looks like a real girl [7].

Sextortion is a new way that scammers use to fool their victims [7]. In this way, the
scammers ask their victims to move the conversation to a webcam using a profile picture of
an attractive girl who is looking for sex. The victim will probably accept this offer and go to
the webcam to find his sexy girl “the cyber-criminal” waiting with a video that has been pre-
recorded where the actions of this video can be controlled by the scammer which makes it
looks real. [7]. While they are video chatting, the scammer will record his victims in order to
blackmail them later saying that they are going to post the video and make their family know
about it. Then, the victim will be asked to transfer a significant amount of money to an
overseas bank account if they want to prevent the scandal [8]. Teenagers are usually the
target of scammers who use this way of scamming [7].

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2.3 Detection and Protection.

The danger of romance scammers is not an easy thing. Therefore, we need to be aware of
them and to be able to differ between real people and cyber-criminals. We can use the
scammers' signs to detect these cyber-criminals. Once we notice that the person we are
talking to uses one of those signs then this will be a hint to know that he/she is a scammer.
Some people may say that some nice friendly people, who are not scammers may have some
of these signs. For instance, some people might be really stuck abroad with no money and
some real love stories could be started on these dating apps. I totally agree with this, but the
question here is “how can we make sure that they are real and not scammers?”

2.3.1 Google image.

We have mentioned in this paper that scammers use fake profile pictures. They usually use
images for attractive people. Some of these people are models. All you need to do to make
sure if they use their real pictures or not is to go to save their pictures and go to Google
Images and upload the picture. Once you upload the picture, Google will give you all the
information about this person whether they is a porn star or a model. If you Google does not
have information about this guy, then it is a sign for that you are talking to a person who is
not a scammer.

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2.3.2 IP Address.

As you can see, Google images can help us identify the person we are talking to using his
picture to verify if he is real or not. It is basically helps us to gather information about who
we are talking to. However, some scammers may claim that they are bank managers or that
they are talking to us from police stations [1]. In this case, we are dealing with a scammer
who can put their real picture. Therefore, using Google images will not help us to tell if he is
saying the truth or not. Thus, we will need to gather more information about the person we
are talking to, such as his address which will let us know if he is really talking from a police
station or not. There are some websites that can tell you all the information about the person
you are talking to, such as what is my IP address. This site will help you to get all the
information only if you have the IP address of the scammer. In order to get the IP address of
the scammer we can use the same way that they use with us, which is social engineering. If
you can make the cyber-criminal click on a link you give to them, then you will be easily
able to track them and to get their IP address. There are some websites that can help you
create a fake link and you can later send to the scammer. Once the scammer clicks on your
link, their IP address will appear on the website that you used to make your link. Once you
get their IP address you can go to what is my IP address. and get the information you need,
such as their address and other information. One of these websites which help us generate
fake links is called Grabify. All you need to do is to go this site, generate a link and send it to
the scammer. Once the scammer clicks on the generated link, go to Grabify, refresh the page
and get the scammer’s information. Follow the following steps to get the scammer IP
address. First of all, use Grabify and put any real link in white bar. Then click on create
URL.

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After that, as you can see below, you can the domain name and the extension you want to
have in your fake link. All you need to do now is to copy the link and give it to the scammer
trying to convince them to click on it. Once they click on the link, you can just refresh the
page to see the result, which is 0 right now.

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Below is the result after we got the click from the scammer and now we have their IP
address, which we can use in what is my IP address.

what is my IP address. will give us all the information once we give it the IP address of the
scammer as shown below:

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Conclusion

All in all, we can briefly conclude that the danger of romance scammer is very huge and we
all need to be aware of this kind of danger. Firstly, we need to know what are the technical
ways that they use to fool their victims, such as the VWC. Secondly, we need to know what
kind of messages they usually use, such as the kind of messages that they use to play on their
victims’ emotions or the love the other kind which is the love messages. Additionally, we
need to be able to protect ourselves from their dangers by making sure that they are using
real pictures and they are not laying about where they are. Finally, keep in mind being nice
with others tells how nice you are, but never let your kindness lead you to fall in the
scammers’ traps.

References

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[2] Gregory, D. W., & Nikiforova, B. (2012, November/December). A Sweetheart of a Deal:

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[4] Whitty, M. T. (n.d.). Anatomy of the Online Dating Romance Scam. Retrieved September 9,
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[5] Internet Dating and Romance Scams. (n.d.). Retrieved September 6, 2016, from
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[6] Koon, T., & Yoong, D. (n.d.). Preying on Lonely Hearts: A Systematic Deconstruction of an
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[7] Fathers, T. (2015). SCAMMERS & ONLINE DATING FRAUD. Retrieved from
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[8] Wittes, B., Poplin, C., Jurecic, Q., & Spera, C. (2016, May). Sextortion: Cybersecurity,
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