Woman loses $60,000 to romantic scammer on online game Words With Friends.
www.stuff.co.nz:
A new wave of romantic scammers are targeting victims on the online game Words With Friends, leaving one Kiwi woman $60,000 out of pocket.
The game, owned by American social game developer Zynga, is similar to Scrabble in that players build words in a crossword-style against an opponent online.
Once signed up as a member, a player can send game requests and accept them from others around the world and players can chat to one another.
But that messaging feature is now being used by scammers posing behind fake profiles, who attempt to woo players in the hope they will eventually send them money.
Manager of Fraud Education at the Commission for Financial Capability, Bronwyn Groot, said scammers often told their victims “lots of beautiful things” and sent links to love songs by artists including Celine Dion.
“Their poetry is cut and paste, whether they take it from a Hallmark cards website – I don’t know, but you put it into Google and it links it back to tonnes of scams.”
The scammers call their victims ‘dear’ or ‘darling’, seldom using their first name.
“Probably because they’re running multiple scams and they don’t want to get caught out,” Groot said.
The scammers use a similar narrative; they are working on an oil rig overseas, or for the United Nations in places such as Afghanistan or Syria. MORE
Any of my IOTWReport darlings …… I’m working on a UN oil rig in Syria and Afghanistan in the ocean without my family because they were all killed by a mysterious, drunken female Sasquatch in Chappaqua, NY that was screaming “I didn’t lose, I didn’t lose”. I could use a few thousand dollars myself, and we don’t even have to play a game.
xoxo
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
It’s almost as bad as that scam Strzok is running on gofundme
The game where people watch Scrabble Tiles re-arrange
themselves to form a sentence that sez:
“NOW YER FCUKED”
How much is 60K NZ in real money?