Six signs that will help you avoid being a victim of fraud on Valentine’s Day.
St. Valentine’s Day is slowly taking over of all social media channels. Even if you are a happy single person, the sweet love spreading everywhere may be too much to resist. But beware: Valentine’s Day is not just a feast for lovers! ESET’s news page WeLiveSecurity.com offers you six essential ways to find out if your online date is a fraud.
It may happen to all of us on Valentine’s Day. The opportunities are legion: enticing dating sites, Facebook profiles that look too good to be true, or married people on the prowl for some extracurricular romance. While the signs that something is not right are sometimes too obvious to miss, there are more sophisticated frauds who carefully plan each step of their entrapment. Their stories may change from time to time, but the reasons stay the same – they want your personal data and money.
“Sometimes they’ll wheel out a sob story from their family and ask for thousands of dollars – the average online dating fraud victim pays out over $13,000,“ the blog post on WeLiveSecurity.com reports.
Most of the fraudsters will push you to get off the original site to talk via email or text messages, while avoiding phone conversations.
“Most dating sites can monitor conversations for likely fraudsters – telltale signs like exchanging bank data, for example – and they don’t want their cover to be blown. Also Nigerian and Eastern European fraudsters will pretend to be 20-something women from the US, Australia and Britain - a pretense they can’t keep up over the phone,” the report adds.
Read more about “Is your online Valentine for real? Six signs you might be falling for a fraudster” in the latest blog on WeLiveSecurity.com.
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