On-Line Dating Fraud

For those of you that follow my posts, you have seen me discuss various types of risks, incidents, breaches, and even fraud. However, this one is personal and affects many more of our friends and family than I knew. According to the FBI stats, on-line dating fraud is a $500M a year business and averages close to $30k per incident for the over 15k cases reported through IC3 annually.

So, how is this personal? Well, we lost my mom unexpectedly several years ago and my Dad, who is still in good health, finds himself lonely. On a bored whim he joined Christian Mingle and created an honest profile using words like faith, trust, companionship, etc. While these words seem innocuous enough, within 24 hours he was bombarded with hits and solicitations fueled by the AI bots reacting to his unknowingly popular keywords used by perspective victims. Weeding through these he starts a conversation with a seemingly nice lady from the UK (pictured above). They trade messages and quickly move to texts and emails outside the confines of the on-line dating site. Over the course of the next several weeks they build a friendship and she sends him pictures of herself and supposedly of her 3 year old daughter. She wants to come visit and even sends him an image of their airline fares to come for a visit. Then it starts…

Suddenly the little girl needs medical care, medications, and other financially small expenses, prior to travelling, for which he is more than happy to assist. Before long he is introduced to her “attorney” who takes over as the story gets more bizarre and difficult to follow/believe. When I finally found out the depth of this scam, he was convinced she had been arrested by the British police for illegally importing gold bars into the UK, the little girl was in hiding and it was ugent life and death that he bring a significant amount of money to help them out of the trouble they were in. Now understand, my father is a smart man. He has a college degree in IT, he started and built his own successful transportation company and has been a mentor to many. However, he was utterly convinced he needed to take the first available flight and was only contacting me to see if I could take care of his cat while he was gone to the UK. My dad has never been outside North America. It absolutely astounded me how quickly and thoroughly this group was able to work their scam on him.

Fortunately, we have a strong relationship and I was able to show him the FBI LIN focused on on-line dating fraud and pick through the various correspondence to provide enough discrepancies to finally convince him he was being conned. 

So, why am I sharing this information on LinkedIn? I have attached a video that was shared by the fake attorney illustrating the $10M in gold and diamonds that was a promised windfall if only my father would help this woman and her little daughter. This guy uses the pseudonym of an Andy Harris who is an actual London based attorney and Partner at a multi-location law firm. When I contacted them, they acknowledged this as fraud and a scam. He has recently setup a fake website at andyharris.legal however I have found the associated providers of NameCheap and OVA to be less than helpful on getting it taken down. 

This guy needs to be made internet famous so he cannot continue to work this con on good-hearted and vulnerable members of our society.