This is the story of Anne and Biff, a journey through the eerie world of love scams. Learn how the art of delinquent seduction works. “Maybe I’m already falling in love with you?’
You know me, Anne. She is a 65-year-old widow from London who lost her husband to cancer a few years ago. He had a successful business for painting and decorating rooms, which Anne sold a few months ago. She has a son who turned 40 last year, but no longer lives nearby. Anne owns a five-bedroom house on the outskirts of South London, as well as two opulence cars. That’s the catch of Ann — she is a completely fictional character created by Norton Labs.
Romance scams involve someone being tricked into believing they are in a relationship with someone they met online, but that person is a scammer to gain the trust of the victim to gain access to money. And a lot of money. According to the FTC, victims lost $304 million in 2020 due to romantic scammers.
To better understand romance scammers, we created Anne and invented her circumstances to make her an attractive target for potential scammers. And she was attractive. Five minutes after registering Ann on a popular online dating site, she received her first message from a man whose profile name was “crazy for your money”. We checked his profile.
Getting to Know a scammer
We exchanged several messages before he offered to continue the conversation by e-mail. Scammers prefer to transfer the conversation from a dating site to instant messaging platforms as soon as possible because they know that their time on a dating site is limited.
As soon as a message appears about a dating profile that is allegedly being used for fraudulent purposes, dating sites usually delete it in good faith.
Ann agreed to translate this conversation into an email, and we exchanged the email addresses. Below you can see the conversation with a scammer on a dating site in full.
Getting to know Anne financially and secretly
The conversation continued via email and Skype chat, where Biff continued to assess whether Anne was a worthy target by asking personal questions about her finances.
Biff also constantly reminded her to keep the conversations between them a secret and got angry whenever Anne mentioned her son. At one point, he even suggested that Anne should limit contact with her son because he “does not suit her”.
Biff managed to compliment Ann in his emails, and he knew exactly what to say to make Ann fall in love with him.
