Love Scam

Tags: love scam

Love Scam

Scam is an act of dishonest person or group in an attempt to gain benefit from someone else. Scammer mostly represent as trustable person such as a doctor, police, lawyer or even your friend could be a scammer. There are a lot of type of scams such as Online purchase scam, Microsoft phone scam, lottery scam, China official impersonation scam and many more. Love scam or also known as romance scam is one of the type of scam. Romance scam is also a type of cybercrime. Malaysia as a developing country that looking forward of advancement in ICT usage in most sectors need to take make serious strategies or awareness to overcome this problem. Love scam will brings many side effects. It will degrade the economic growth of Malaysia, affect the development of the youth and mostly importantly the it will affect the mental health of the victims. Love scam is a confidence scheme or a total ripoff. It involve feigning romantic intention towards the victim after gaining their trust. Most of these scammer will make their victims to allow them to access their private information such as bank accounts, credit cards, national identification card number and many more as long as it brings benefits to them. Some of the scammer use this trick on their victim who lives in developed country like USA just to get green card where they will get priviledge from it.

Figure 1:

shows Internet Love Scam is one of top 10 scams base on asiaone

Love Scam in Malaysia

In a fact, majority people nowadays in Malaysia only likes to pursuit of friendship online for about maintaining existing friendships, there also people that believe that these new ‘friends’ from internet that they don’t really investigate who are they in detail or they don’t at least meet each other in real life agreed to be in a ‘relationship’ and the worst part is it involved personal information and money.

In 2012, 814 cases were reported by the police with total lost of RM 33 million and the numbered increased each year and in 2017, 2497 total cases were recorded with losses almost RM100 million. That’s 3 times higher than the last 6 years. And one of the factors that contribute the increasing number of cases is the advancement of technology going on around us. More surprisingly is that the increasing number of millennials and Gen Y professionals are falling to these scams.

Internet ethics and rules has covered this matter to all the end user of the internet where ethics are a set of moral principles that all the user should follow but if the user don’t follow these acceptable behaviours, the user won’t be getting any charge. And one of the ethics is the user shouldn’t be pretending to be someone else. These scammers will use fake photos or stolen picture. Like a very attractive person’s picture to lure the victim in hoping the victim attracted to the photos. After the scammer and the victim ‘getting know each other’ the scammer will start to ask the victim for money for various reason like, gas money, pocket money, education expenses or these scammers promised their victim that they will meet up as long as they pay for the airplane tickets, but at the very last moment, he or she ended up cancel the meet up.

Other than that, there’s a scam that we call them a pro-dater, it is different from the all I’ve mention above because this method is operated by face-to-face meeting. The scammer will manipulate the victim to come to their country. This method can be done by group where the they will split the money at the end of the day. For example, these scammer will arrange everything for the victim to go to their place. Their taxi driver after the victim arrived at the airport, the hotel, and last but not least, the scammer will make the victim come to a fancy restaurant to meet up or they will go to certain shops to buy expensive gifts for the scammer. And usually, these taxi driver, the owner of the restaurant and the vendor is part of the scheme where they will split the money at the end of the day.

Figure 2

419 scam or more known as Nigerian scams is one of love scam out there. It is known as Nigerian scams because of the first wave of them came from Nigeria. The scammer will tell the victim to about a story where their money, a large sum of money, are trapped in banks due for some reason or they will ask for money for gold taxes where this applied to the country due to government restriction. The scammer will also promise the victim to pay the money and some of them will offer a large amount of money right after they get their ‘money’. And last but not least, blackmail. Blackmail is a tactic from the scammer to make the victim to perform sexual acts on webcam, or they’ll ask the victim a picture of themselves naked. They will then save these files or recording and use them to send it to friends, family or employers if the victim refuse to send money to the scammer.

Conclusion

In my point of view, love scam is a serious matter and the society need to focus on this issue so the harmony of a society can be maintained from this immoral activities. Despite the challenges facing from these scammers. There are some tips that can be done to avoid romance scam like we can ask for an updated photo like the victim can ask for a selfie. We can also search the pictures on google. The victim can save scammer’s photos and use search tool to identify where did the scammer get this photo from because it could be fake. A community should make campaign of awareness for the society in Malaysia. The campaign need to elaborate to all the community that they’re encouraged to tell the cops that they’re in similar situation. The campaign need to be done more often than ever especially on seasonal season like on Valentine Day because statistically, the number of case in Malaysia increased each year. And for the victim, if the victim realised that they’re in this kind of situation, seek helps. Go get a consultation by anyone the victim can rely on, a counsellor, parents or psychiatrist. And then the victim can proceed to more detail like the police and more.

Reference

Updated on 18 May 2020, 6:52 PM; 1771 page visits from 31 October 2018 to 5 October 2025

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