By Jessica Yun
Working for an oil rig, part of the military, or a dignitary with the United Nations: these are the excuses you might hear if you’re in a budding online romance with someone who never wants to meet in person or jump on a call because they’re actually a scammer.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the major banks are urging Australians to help loved ones recognise the red flags of a romance scammer amid predictions that financial losses from scams are set to double this year.
The ACCC is urging people to have conversations with loved ones today about romance scams.Credit: iStock
“It’s really listening to what they’re saying and those warning signs, like: they’ve never been able to meet in person or by video call; they’ve strung a terrible sob story; [or] they’ve started asking for money,” ACCC deputy chair Catriona Lowe said.
Australians lost $40.5 million to romance scams in 2022 – and that’s only the amount that has been self-reported. More broadly, overall financial losses from scams are expected to double to $4 billion this year, prompting governments, banks and telcos to ramp up prevention efforts.
The ACCC is hoping to raise awareness of common signs of a romance scam, which may include evoking empathy, asking for financial assistance, or telling you about a high-return investment. People aged 65 and over are particularly susceptible to romance scams, accounting for 12.9 million of the $40.5 million lost last year.
“We find that actually a significant proportion of the reports of romance scams come to us from family and friends,” Lowe said.
“[Scammers] are criminals who are very deliberately seeking to part Australians from their money. And all too often that also ends up in heartbreak, very expensive heartbreak, in the case of romance scams.”
The financial exploitation of Valentine’s Day
Romance scams happen all year round, but particularly around Valentine’s Day. Westpac head of fraud Benjamin Young said the outcome of a scam on Valentine’s Day might not be known until much later in the year.
“Romance scammers tend to be very long-play scams – you meet someone today, they wait weeks and months sometimes before they pull the trigger and ask for money,” he said. “You’ll see scams start today, but you won’t discover them – either [by] the customer or the bank notifies them – until many, many months later.“
Westpac head of fraud Benjamin Young.Credit: Peter Rae
Although older Australians are generally more susceptible to romance scams, technology and the popularity of dating apps have made scammers more cunning.
After creating a fake dating profile, scammers will try to move the conversation away from the app to more secure communication platforms such as WhatsApp to avoid detection. Banks often don’t have much visibility over an elaborate scam until the final transaction, which is often manipulated to appear very ordinary.
“They will coach the victim as to what to say, what to write ... ‘Say it’s for building renovations or something’,” said Young.
“They’ll be encouraged to write incorrect things in the payment narratives and to answer questions untruthfully ... As a victim, that’s a huge red flag if anyone ever instructs you how to describe a payment.”
As scammers seek victims on dating apps, Westpac has reported a 300 per cent increase in threat or penalty scams with younger males aged 15 to 30 making up nearly half of reported cases.
“Now, sextortion is dramatically younger and much more heavily skewed towards males as being the victims,” Young said.
“Once they’ve got you on the hook, they’ll ask you to send compromising pictures of yourself. But as soon as you hand over the pictures, the scammer essentially unmasks themselves and then just demands the ransom.”
Romance scams are evolving
Westpac has also observed a rise in “romance baiting”, where a scammer will engage with someone on a dating app, then ask them to make a financial investment. Another type of romance scam is “muling”, where a scammer will ask its target to shuffle money into a different account for them.
“They’re not saying send money to Nigeria, they are saying ‘send money to this domestic account’, which is in turn another romance scam victim act[ing] as a mule but it’s a local mule,” he said. “So even the payment itself looks very benign.”
A romance scammer can be spotted because they will never want to talk face-to-face or meet in person and must invent reasons for why, including their living situation. The ACCC and Westpac said working for the military or on an oil rig were common excuses, as were working as a doctor or for the United Nations.
Young and Lowe urged Australians to perform simple checks such as utilising reverse image search to determine if the scammer has made other profiles under different aliases.
“Don’t expect [a conversation] to work. What you’re really doing is planting a seed,” Lowe said. “So have a gentle conversation if you’ve managed to gather evidence, leave that with the person so that they can reflect in their own time.”
The Albanese government has asked the media and communications regulator to examine the viability of a sender ID registry that could help reduce the volume of scam texts Australians receive, while the Commonwealth Bank recently introduced two new measures to prevent scams.
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