You may be thinking that everyone is aware of the dangers of internet predators, sadly this is NOT the case. INSIST ON WEBCAM!!
A client called me today for relationship advice. She had met someone on-line and they were now madly in love. He claimed to be living with in London with his 8 year old daughter, he had sent her pictures of the two of them, and was planning to visit her.
However, a few days before the planned visit, he claimed to be having issues with the Nigerian Tax Office, he was supposedly in Nigeria on business and this issue would delay his visit.
Her question was, is he genuine or is this just an excuse because he has had a change of heart? The really scary part of this, is that this lady had been so taken in by this person that all she was concerned about was his sincerity, the fact that this is OBVIOUSLY a scammer had not even entered her head.
My advice, of course was to sever contact and for future reference to ALWAYS insist on seeing someone, ANYONE, on web-cam, before you engage in regular contact. Despite this advice, she still didn’t appear to grasp the reality of the situation and asked if I thought he had perhaps sent pictures that were not really him!
Nigerian scammer’s will search the Internet for pictures which they then pass off as their own. Modelling sites are a popular resource.
This is not the first time that I have encountered this kind of thing in my work. One lady I met had sent £5000 to one of these scammers who claimed to work for an oil company and found himself ’stranded’ and in need of cash to get home. Yet another sent me the email interaction between her and a scammer, he claimed to live in a certain part of NY but didn’t seem to be able to spell the name of the place he lived.
This may seem like an obvious and well known scam but sadly it still happens and unwary, lonely people still get drawn in and part with huge amounts of cash.
Don’t be a victim of this scam. A web cam is not expensive, buy one and insist that anyone you speak to on-line does likewise before you enter into regular contact.
It should go without saying that you should never EVER send money to someone you met on-line and have never met in person, but after my interaction with this client it is apparent that this does need to be stated over and over!
November 7th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Good article. Yes, there are a lot of scams originating from Nigeria. I myself have received these bogus emails that state the person had a relative die, leaving them hoards of money, but needed money to help pay taxes to get the situation out of probate or cleared by their governement. It’s been around for a long time and I would have thought most people could recognize these emails as the crap they are…one good rule of thumb is to delete any emails you receive where you have no idea who the sender is…spam or not.
November 8th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Well written…