Stories of people getting scammed online by promises of love and romance seem to be everywhere these days, and while some of us may believe it could never happen to us, intelligent people are falling victim every day, so one developer decided to do a social experiment.
Avoiding a romance scam might seem like an easy thing to do, but scammers clearly have enough monetary success to keep it going, so developer and blogger Ben Tasker wanted to see how this happens, describing the entire process in his blog post on March 11.
How to outsmart a scammer?
In Tasker’s case, you start by pretending to fall for their trap. After receiving multiple emails from a persona called ‘Aidana’ who claimed to be a dentist in Kazakhstan (alongside attaching stolen photographs of a real person), he decided to masquerade as a mark.
For Tasker, it was easy to recognize the emails as coming from a romance scammer. The opening messages hailed from various hacked accounts, and they all used the same style of writing, similar backstories, and stolen photos of the same woman that he tracked to a social media profile.
What are the red flags of a romance scammer?
Also, the messages followed the same theme – ‘Aidana’ ran across his email address a while ago somewhere unspecific, she said she wasn’t a scammer but needed to know he wasn’t either, she wouldn’t send nudes (probably because the profile from which they stole attached photos didn’t include them), and she lived in Kazakhstan.
Another thing Tasker noticed was that all of the emails asked the recipient to reply to a different email address – Aidana’s ‘regular’ mailbox. As he explained, this is because the opening message was sent from a hacked account, and the scammer needed marks to communicate with an account they fully controlled.
While he had multiple personas, he focused on two – Carl and Andy. Once Tasker sent out his initial emails, it took a little over two weeks to receive a response, and all of his personas received it on the same day. As he explained, this was because the scammer runs campaigns on a monthly cycle.
What is a typical romance scammer?
Furthermore, Tasker shared ‘Aidana’s’ very elaborate backstory that was the same across the board. She was a dentist and maxillofacial surgeon living in Almaty, Kazakhstan, who has worked in the US, France, and Israel, doesn’t smoke and barely drinks, goes to the gym, and was looking for a genuine man to build a relationship with.
After exchanging more messages, ‘Aidana’ said she was going to give a presentation at a dentistry competition to try and win funding for overseas training in a country of her choice – and she did it. Naturally, the country of her choice would be the UK, where Tasker’s personas were.
How do you know if you are chatting with a scammer?
Following the first reply, the conversation took a common and loosely templated playbook, with a semi-personalized section at the top, and then shifted to a similar, yet slightly differently worded story. ‘Aidana’ would reply to emails once a day, claiming to be using her work computer as a cover.
Interestingly, when Tasker failed to provide a phone number, the photos of ‘Aidana’ temporarily stopped coming, suggesting a possible use of conditioning techniques (if the mark does what is asked, they’ll receive a reward in the form of a photo, if not – no photo), although the images did resume further down the road.
Eventually, they exchanged several phone calls and ‘Aidana’ also asked for local information to prepare her for her upcoming trip, with the aim to make the victim feel invested, and even provided forged documents to support her story.
Finally, the request for money came as the plan for the move to the UK fell through, and ‘Aidana’ needed £600 ($777), alongside an “additional 20-30 pounds for unforeseen expenses.” She also provided the methods and information needed for the payment. At this point, Tasker called it quits, pretending his bank told him about the romance scam.
How to track down a romance scammer?
After the initial contact, the first reply came from a different email address than the one he’d contacted, which the scammer masked by copying a quote of his email into the bottom and setting an In-Reply-To header referring to his original mail. The blogger also noted that the Date header indicated the author was likely in a UTC+3 time zone, unlike Kazakhstan’s UTC+5.
Throughout the communication, Tasker deployed a series of tips and tricks of his trade to track down the scammer, ultimately discovering that their browser was set to Russian language, and narrowing their location down to Russia, considering the time zone and other small details.
He also concluded that there’s probably a single individual behind the emails, likely doing all of their day’s work in one sitting and at different times of the day. By the end of his campaign, he ended up with a name and a home IP of the person behind the romance scam.
It’s important to note that Tasker has done all this to his own responsibility and you shouldn’t attempt to do it yourself, as it might lead to the revelation of your private information, retaliation, arrest, loss of funds, fraud marker, or pinning a target on the wrong person.
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