Facebook Bitcoin Scam: Lover conned woman out of £80,000 this way; Know how to stop it

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Cybercrimes have spread their tentacles everywhere and that includes social networking sites! Yes, along with everything else, fraud too has moved online. In recent times many reports have detailed how people are being scammed over social networking sites like Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, among others. These scams are not limited to any specific place or country and in fact, cases are being reported from all over the world. The latest case is from the UK, where a woman has been scammed out of £80,000. Here is how this Facebook Bitcoin scam was carried out and how to avoid such cryptocurrency based crimes.

"Brit Sharon Bulmer was swindled out of thousands after a fraudster sent her a Facebook message saying he was "lonely" in May 2020," reported The Sun. The scammer used photos of a European politician dubbed "silver fox" to trick her out of her money. As per the report, the fraudster used a fake Facebook profile with a photo of Latvian defence minister Artis Pabriks and said that he was a US soldier posted in Syria. The scamster, who claimed to be Murphy Townsend, a 56-year-old man from Washington DC with a teenage daughter, had told Sharon that he was serving in Raqqa, Syria.

After Sharon responded positively to his overtures, the fraudster started asking her for money and that too through cryptocurrency Bitcoin. He said that the money was required for hospital bills and plane tickets. She discovered later that he was a fraudster, but by that time she had given him tens of thousands of pounds. This is not the first time that a fraudster has used the fake 'silver fox' Facebook profile and photo to scam people. Authorities in Latvia say they are aware of more than 100 phoney profiles using photo of Pabriks to scam women.

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