Inktober 2019/ Day 3 -«Bait»

My sketch “Bait”/ Scarlet Widow

«A report from cybersecurity company Agari claims to expose one corner of the multimillion-dollar romance scam industry: a Nigerian fraud ring it dubs Scarlet Widow. As with other romance scams, members of Scarlet Widow created numerous fake personas to bait lonely men and women into online relationships. The Agari report, not coincidentally published on Valentine’s Day, offers examples of how they hooked victims in one of the most common forms of online scams.

Scarlet Widow created profiles on mainstream dating sites and apps, allegedly beginning in 2015. It also trawled specialized networks whose users might be particularly lonely or vulnerable, including sites for divorcees, people with disabilities, and farmers in rural areas.
After the scammers established contact, they’d make up a financial emergency, like needing to pay for a flight home. If the target paid up, they’d repeat the process until it was no longer profitable, eventually ghosting their partner who was often deeply emotionally invested in the relationship. In one case study, a Texas man spent more than $50,000 during a fake relationship with “Laura Cahill,” supposedly an American model living in Paris. 

Most people didn’t spend nearly as much as “Laura’s” would-be partner from Texas; the median loss is $2,600, though it rises to $10,000 among people aged 70 and older. But the FTC reported that romance scams still resulted in greater losses than any other type of consumer fraud in 2018.

As the FTC explains, it’s technically simple to avoid losing money to romance scammers: you can run a reverse image search on profile photos to detect fakes, look for inconsistencies in your paramour’s stories, and just avoid sending money to anybody you haven’t met. «

https://www.theverge.com By Adi Robertson  Feb 14, 2019

See more  sketches: series:Inktober 2019/ Day 2 -«Mindless»    series:«Art de lire»

My board Pinterest: Inktober 2019 My board Pinterest: Sketch artist Anna Karlova