Despite all the warning signs and expert advice on how to avoid online dating scams, singles looking for partners online continue to be duped out of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. According to the article, “Online lonely-hearts scam is costing Britons millions of pounds,” online romance fraud has become so prevalent in Britain that the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) is sending officers from its anti-kidnap and extortion units to help train police in areas where many of the mass-marketing romance scams originate, Nigeria and Ghana.

Romance scams have been around much longer than online dating sites. While the Internet has increased people’s chances of finding partners, it also provides a level of anonymity that enables fraudsters to hide their true identities to perpetrate any number of fraudulent or abusive activities against individuals and online dating providers.

Indeed, hard-luck stories of individuals losing tens of thousands of dollars to their Internet sweethearts have certainly raised the awareness of what people should watch out for. But Soca’s Mick Jameson said fraudsters are so good at emotionally connecting with their victims that even when a victim is told they’ve been communicating with a fraudster, they’re still generally concerned with their well-being.

“When we tell people that we have arrested someone who has had them over for tens of thousands of pounds, such is the bond that has been built up they ask if they are OK, or if they need a lawyer. We are not just talking about vulnerable people being caught by this — intelligent people are duped as well. Complacency puts us all at risk.”

For online dating sites, stopping scams and profile misrepresentation is critical to the safety of their good customers, as well as maintaining a trusted online dating environment. Doing this requires fraud management tools that do not rely solely on information provided by the user, but go deeper to identify the computer being used by the perpetrator. By identifying the device, not the person trying to access an online community, solutions such as iovation ReputationManager allow online dating providers to prevent fraudsters from visiting or returning to their remote communities, no matter what false information the criminals provide.

Over the last 90 days in the online community sector alone, over 140,000 new incidents of fraud and abuse attempts have been reported to iovation. That includes nearly 50,000 incidents of scams and solicitations, 25,000 reports of profile misrepresentation, 20,000 incidents of spam, 10,000 reports of credit card fraud, over 5,000 reports of identity mining and many other types of abuse and misconduct. This information is stored in iovation’s Device Reputation Authority, the world’s largest fraud database of device intelligence, and is shared among all iovation subscribers, globally and across multiple industries.

As many of the dating and social network industry’s top business executives convene next week in Beverly Hills for the 7th Annual West Coast Internet Dating Conference, iovation’s Cory Swick will be on hand to discuss how iovation helps online dating and social network communities prevent cyber criminals from accessing their network before they can strike. The show will feature many of the industry’s top leaders discussing how online dating sites can improve business performance, web traffic and conversion rates.

If you plan to attend, take some time to meet with Cory Swick about the fraud and abuse issues your community is experiencing, and have a terrific show.

Tags: iDate Conference, iovation, online dating, online dating fraud, online romance scams, ReputationManager

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 8:32 am 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.