Valentine's Day Romance scams skyrocket! Know tips to stay safe
Valentine's Day is here and although it is a day of love, which is meant to be celebrated with your loved ones, romance scams play a spoilsport as cybercriminals prey on those looking for genuine connections and abuse trust. Reports from around the globe show a similar trend in the rise of romance scams resulting in losses in the millions. Tenable, the Exposure Management company has warned of various romance scams that people could fall prey to on Valentine's Day.
One of the latest schemes to make headlines is "pig butchering", which targets individuals across various messaging, social networks and dating apps through wrong-number text messages and fake dating prospects. Perpetrators seek to gain the victims' trust by developing a fake relationship. The victims are made to believe in false hopes of a true relationship before they are asked to invest in an investment scheme, typically cryptocurrency, but may also include Forex or precious metals like Gold.
On dating apps, scammers will also create fake profiles to drive potential victims to external adult dating websites. These websites, which are often seeded with fake users, leverage affiliate programs to help drive traffic. As a result, scammers abuse the affiliate programs to direct victims to create accounts on these websites with valid email addresses, which earn them a modest profit between $2-4 USD. The holy grail is a premium lead, which is where a victim inputs their credit card information into these websites, which can earn a scammer anywhere between $50-100 USD per sign-up.
Poorly constructed sentences or grammatical errors are one of the few tell-tale signs of phishing emails and dating app profiles. With the prevalence of Pig Butchering scams, ChatGPT could
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