Most people worry over the risk of becoming victim of such crimes such as burglary or mugging but they don’t expect their money to be stolen through other forms of crime. This is despite more and more publicity over identity theft and other fraudulent crimes.
By making themselves aware of these crimes, the public can prevent them before they occur instead of becoming part of the crime statistics. Every year fraud costs the UK around £20 billion, with £3 billion of it being lost through Internet scams.
One of the latest scams is called the ‘lonely hearts’ scam. This scam affects online users who use chatrooms or dating websites for online relationships. The way it works is the fraudster befriends the victim over a period of time by feigning interest in them. All the time however, they are really interested in how rich their victim is, or how much access they have to credit.
After they have gained the victim’s confidence, the fraudster dupes them into taking out a personal loan or handing over life savings. There is always a ‘hardluck story’, usually a claim that this new friend desperately needs money for an operation or for travel expenses to escape an opressive regime.
Typically this type of fraud involves a man or woman from another country who builds a relationship over time through email and phone calls. The relationship can last for months with the fraudster requesting to borrow money slowly over the time period, or they could suddenly come up with an emergency where they need the funds.
Although you may feel that you would never fall for something so obvious as this scam, it happens to people every day. The internet has a way of breaking down barriers between people, and the victims afterwards report that they genuinely thought they had found love or at least a real friend. When speaking with others who live in much poorer circumstances guilt over their better lifestyle is often all that is needed for the victim to borrow money to help out their new ‘friend’.
Unfortunately fraud has caused many people to become wary of others’ intentions, but with the amount of fraud that is occurring people do need to be more cautious.
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