![\"online-dating-scam\"](\"https:\/\/blog-en.webroot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/online-dating-scam-300x225.jpg\")
Online dating can be rough, and no matter how many safeguards are in place in the multiple legitimate dating websites out there, the scammers are getting around the blocks and still luring in potential victims.\u00a0 While the reports of these types of scams are out there (even with copy and paste examples of the e-mails used), people still fall for the scams every day.\u00a0 In this particular case, it was my profile on eHarmony that was targeted, and this is my recount of it.<\/p>\n
It started with a potential match; a profile with a collection of tasteful photos of a beautiful woman, not too \u2018out there\u2019, but a face that stood out from the crowd.\u00a0 The profile was fairly complete, with a few of the smaller-scale questions not answered.\u00a0 Overall, the profile initially raised no suspicion for me.\u00a0 So, I started the song and dance that is the eHarmony way, and back and forth we went with questions and such.\u00a0 That is, until the last stage when the match sent over a cryptic message of not being able to communicate via the system and that I should e-mail her.\u00a0 And up went the red flag.<\/p>\n
Now, most systems out there allow communication up to a certain point, and in this case, eHarmony was on a free communication week, and even if it hadn\u2019t been, we had not reached that final \u2018free\u2019 part yet.\u00a0 Assuming that many of the companies have basic language and text scanned in their internal mail systems, it can be supposed that the person on the other end was avoiding being flagged.<\/p>\n
So with this e-mail in hand (my inbox), I decided to see how far this rabbit hole went.\u00a0 Using a non-personal e-mail address that I setup for mailing lists, I contacted my match with a basic re-introduction and waited.\u00a0 A few hours later, I received back an incredibly long, detailed e-mail with a few photos attached.\u00a0 The e-mail was not well written, and the local geographic locations mentioned in it did not make sense in the description.\u00a0 At this point, I was 100% sure it was a scam and decided to reverse image search the photos, which lead me to a model out of Australia, and then searched the generic line of text to find over 78,000 results<\/a> showing almost exact copies of the e-mail I had received.<\/p>\n A quick reply back lead to an even longer response from the scammer, again using photos from the model\u2019s profile page and the same content found on many scam reporting websites.\u00a0 But this time, I was being asked for money, as \u2018she\u2019 was stuck in London, unable to get home.\u00a0 Conveniently, there was already a bank account setup for me to transfer money.\u00a0 At this point, I had what I needed for this write-up, and so I \u00a0marked the account as \u2018spam\u2019 and reported the profile to the eHarmony team.<\/p>\n So what can we learn from this little experience?\u00a0 Well, a few things.\u00a0 Despite the safeguards in place to help protect those looking for a relationship online, the protection is not perfect, and users need to be educated.\u00a0 Here are a few tips for you to help spot a potential scammer:<\/p>\n Remember, you will never know who is on the other side of that screen until you meet them.\u00a0 Use safe and cautious measures, never give out personal information, and be aware of the tricks being used on the digital daters of today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Online dating can be rough, and no matter how many safeguards are in place in the multiple legitimate dating websites out there, the scammers are getting around the blocks and still luring in potential victims.\u00a0 While the reports of these types of scams are out there (even with copy and paste examples of the e-mails […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":16730,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3005],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[17905,22421,11331,6865,17891,5297,3717,22423,17895,4149,3609,3695,17893,17897,15571,9249,4973,17899,5565,5003],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16729"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24583,"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16729\/revisions\/24583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16729"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https://www.webroot.com/blog/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=16729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n