The month of February provided another stark reminder that cyber criminals continue to be on the prowl in online dating communities.

According to a recent Toronto Sun article, “Money scammers target online daters,” Durham Regional Police received several reports—all during the weeks following Valentine’s day—from women claiming they had been scammed by men they met online. After several months of courtship and communications with these men, women then said they were asked to wire money overseas to help with work-related charity efforts. Some women were also conned into providing personal identification and financial details to the suspects and were debited “substantial amounts of money from their personal accounts.”

While stories like these may start to sound more and more familiar, the fact that they keep happening indicates that we need to continue to promote awareness and as scammers continue to work hard at finding new victims and coming up with new scams. Each year, they leverage online dating sites as a platform to swindle lonely hearts out of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

In a recent Miami New Times article, “Tech Keeps Scammers Out of Your Heart and Wallet,” iovation reported the following statistics based on activity from the last 90 days alone:

• Over 67,000 instances of spam
• Over 30,000 scams and solicitations
• Over 13,000 member profiles misrepresented
• Over 5,000 cases of identity mining and phishing

That is a lot of fraud and abuse—not to mention, that’s only information from the dating sites using iovation’s fraud protection. Just imagine the amount of fraud happening on all of the other online communities. And, with over 400 million people using dating sites worldwide, the pool of potential victims for fraudsters is huge. That’s why it is imperative that online communities continue to promote awareness about dating scams and put in place the tools necessary to identify fraudsters and prevent them from returning to communities.

Tags: cyber criminals, device reputations, fraud management, online dating sites, online scammers, ReputationManager

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Online Communities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.