When it comes to online dating scams, we all like to believe we learn from our own, and others, experiences. But according to new statistics on Romancescams.org, a website dedicated to fighting online romance scams, the average loss per person involved in a romance scam has climbed to a staggering $11,500. That’s up from a 2007 report where the advocacy group cited the average loss per victim was $7,900.

According to the article, “Website offers forum on avoiding romance scams,” fraudsters continue to successfully scam unsuspecting lonely hearts by using stolen credit cards to join online dating sites and set up fake profiles. From there, they quickly lure their victims off the dating sites and onto more personal lines of communications such as instant messaging and email before romance sites can discover the stolen credit card and pull their fake profiles.

Barbara Sluppick, the founder of Romancescams.org, said the problem continues to escalate despite having more information.

“I am sorry to say scams are growing all the time. Phonebusters, the Canadian organization that deals with online scams, recently said that more money is earned in online scams than in the drug trade. Australia recently put together a commission to deal with these scams, as they have discovered their losses are topping $1 million a month.”

While Sluppick and other anti-fraud advocates are doing everything they can to educate the public about scammers and their evolving methods, including posting photos of scammers, as long as fraudsters are able to successfully bypass fraud management tools and techniques to create false identities, the industry will continue to see similar increases in online dating scams.

With scammers continuously providing new information to create multiple profiles, we cannot expect to effectively catch them with tools that solely rely on identifying the person or the false data they provide. As they evolve, so should the methods to detect them. New techniques that don’t rely on personal information to identify and stop fraud are needed to provide a defense-in-depth approach that complements and enhances online dating sites’ existing anti-fraud security strategies.

On July 20th, iovation CEO and co-founder, Greg Pierson, presented to 800 webinar registrants, a comprehensive way to detect criminal activity online, without collecting personally identifiable information (PII) or interrupting the user experience. Over 300 major brands (including more than 30 major dating site providers) use iovation’s fraud protection service to protect their members from romance scams, spam, financial fraud and many other forms of online fraud and abuse. To watch the webinar, please visit www.iovation.com/risk-mitigation.

Tags: anti-fraud tools, defense in depth, fraud management tools, online dating fraud, online scams, romance scams

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 9:24 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.