VICTIM’S STORY FROM AUSTRALIA

Lonely and unfamiliar with the world of internet dating, Peter was just looking for a nice lady when an attractive woman introduced herself via an online dating site. She sounded genuine and the photos looked good. “I thought everything was alright the way she spoke, the things she used to say," says the 66-year-old pensioner and retired tyre-fitter from Dubbo. The pair exchanged phone numbers and spoke nearly every day. A few weeks later, the woman began asking for money.

"It started off, could I lend her $500? She had me believe there was going to be a relationship and she was going to move in here with me," he says. "It ended up to about $9500."

Peter is one of thousands of Australians whom fraudsters have left not just broken-hearted, but also broke. Nearly one-third of the $90 million swindled from Australians last year was swiped from people searching for love, a new report into targeting scams shows. Dating and romance-related fraud netted $25.2 million last year, up 8 per cent on the previous year, making it the top scam by total losses, according to the latest report by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Romance-related scams also yielded some of the highest returns per victim, accounting for nearly 30 per cent of money lost but only 3 per cent of reported scams. Those who fell for romance-related scams lost an average of $21,200 each more than three times the $7000 average loss across all reported scams.

ACCC deputy chairwoman Delia Rickard said relationship scams caused the most emotional and economic harm to victims, with fraudsters investing substantial effort into researching their victims. "They are very good at tapping into people's emotions. They will spend weeks, months, even years, really building a trust relationship," she said.

That an increasing number of people are meeting genuine partners online has made others more vulnerable to victimisation through internet dating sites. She said the ACCC was working with dating and romance sites to implement proper security.

"People want to find love and a lot of people are in a very vulnerable state when they do fall for [these scams]. We often see that people are recently divorced, recently widowed, and lonely."

She said that many fraudsters combined strategies such as romance and business opportunity scams or advance fee fraud and identity theft. "They will get personal information or bank account information that will enable them to commit further fraud down the line." Advanced fee/upfront payment schemes reaped the second biggest cash haul, with just under $25 million pinched last year. This was followed by computer prediction software and investment scams. Phishing and identity theft showed the largest increase in number, leaping 73 per cent from 2012 to become the second-most common type of scam. People were most likely to fall for health and medical scams, with more than one in two people reporting this kind of scam losing money. Online shopping and psychic or clairvoyant schemes were the next most convincing, according to the report.

One in three victims lost between $100 and $499, suggesting scammers continued to favour high-volume scams such as those asking victims for a small upfront payment to secure a larger sum of money "owed" to them by an organisation. One in 10 lost more than $10,000. Only two of losses more than $1 million were reported to the consumer watchdog last year, with losses of several million dollars linked to sports betting schemes. More than 91,000 complaints were made to the consumer watchdog last year, a four-fold increase from 2009. In a positive sign however, scammers raked in 5 per cent less money than the year before, although the ACCC said many scams go unreported.

The most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics personal fraud survey estimates Australians lost $1.4 billion to fraud – more than 15 times the loss reported to the ACCC last year.

Source: SCAMWatch [scamwatch.gov.au]