> ROMANCE PREDATORS
❏ H
as someone fallen in love with
you quickly?
❏ D
o they immediately want to leave
the dating site to use IM or email?
❏ D
o they claim to be from the U.S. but
working overseas; Nigeria or UK?
And so on. Wheaton answered yes to every question.
Romancscams.org is stocked with veterans of romance cons. Started in 2005,
its founder is Barbara Sluppick, who
started the group after she fell for a man
online who claimed to be from the UK.
“I knew that his accent was Nigerian,” Sluppick recalls. “I was just lucky
enough to have a guy that I worked with
that was Nigerian and I’d had many,
many conversations with him.”
Sluppick pulled herself out of the relationship before losing any money to
her predator, but others she works with
haven’t been as fortunate. Today, Romancescams.org has 19,000 active members posting about their experiences and
supporting one another, the details of
their stories helping to lift the veil off of
the ways scammers operate.
Sluppick say that the majority of romance scams she deals with originate
in Ghana and Nigeria and that predators there have provided a road map for
how they target and take advantage of
victims. “They’re taking actual notes,”
Sluppick says of the predators. “You say,
HUFFINGTON
06.24.12
‘Oh, I’m looking to have three kids and
I want this and I want that.’ In a very
short period of time, they become the
dream person that you’re looking for.”
According to Sluppick, a scammer’s
first move is to get a victim off a dating
site and on to e-mail or instant messenger — they might even say they cancelled
their membership on the dating site because they found their perfect match.
Then come the endearing nicknames
— “baby,” “honey,” “sweetie.” Predators
use the same pet name for all of their
victims — everyone is just “sweetie,” for
example — so they don’t screw up names
when they’re IM-ing (mistakenly calling
Jane, Mary, and outing themselves).
Most scammers are men, analysts say,
but they’re savvy enough to con their own:
Whitty says that predators can use apps to
disguise their voices over the phone, allowing a husky-voiced male to sound like
a breathy, eager young woman. Digitally
enhanced, the scams just keep coming. According to the FBI, there have been 2,600
romance scam complaints made in 2012
so far, and 790 of them were by males,
with $3.6 million in reported losses.
Sluppick notes that predators also use
gifts as part of their artillery. Beyond
merely softening up a victim, gift-giving
allows predators to get a crucial bit of
information: an address. With an address
in hand, predators can set up a reshipping scam. They buy items with a stolen