Meet the online vigilantes who expose dating fraudsters conning thousands of pounds out of those searching for love
Wayne May and Kari-Anne Liebling run ScamSurvivors.com, where they dedicate their free time to exposing online fraudsters conning lonely hearts out of their hard earned cash
FALLING in love with someone you’ve never met before is something that many of us can’t even begin to understand.
But it happens more than you think, with victims of romance fraud being conned out of £41MILLION last year, according to Action Fraud.
It’s a cruel category of fraud, where scammers prey on vulnerable people on dating sites by using fake profiles and fake stories.
They begin grooming victims over emails and phone calls before asking for personal information or in the worst case scenario – money.
On average, Action Fraud received 10 reports a day from victims of romance scammers, with 18 percent of them being left at risk of bankruptcy.
But you can’t always get your money back if you report it to the police because the scammers are often from abroad or ask for victims to send money via bank transfer.
But a team of “scam baiters” has decided to turn the tide and expose these scammers and warn others before they part with their cash.
Swansea based Wayne May – not his real name – runs the website and is taking on the fraudsters, helping victims by exposing the dodgy email addresses from fake lovers.
The forum’s been running since 2012 and Wayne claims their website is visited by around 9,000 people from all over the world every day. Typically, two to three of these enquiries are about victims from a romance scam.
“We get emails from victims or from people who reckon they’re friend or family member is being scammed,” Wayne explained. “Then we’ll run some checks on the email.
“We’ve got ways of finding out if they’ve faked the email address, find out the real one and we can find out the email route to trace where it came from.
“Nowadays we get so many emails we can’t keep them talking to them. We do what we can and then post them in the forum. Then people can search for the name or the email address of the person they’ve been talking to and check to see if it’s a scam.”
Wayne, who’s day job is a carer, typically spends about five to six hours a day “volunteering” on the site. He doesn’t charge for his services but you can make a donation to the site if you like.
Sometimes, his work is simply a case of finding out if an email address is genuine but others it can be a whole lot worse.
“One woman from England got in touch once. Over a few months she’d handed over £15,000 to a guy she’d met online. She lost everything.
“She’d sold her car and was made homeless. She’d sent the scammer a photocopy of her ID and he’d used it to scam other people. He was using her address and passport.
“She went to the police but there wasn’t really anything they can do about that because the scammer was in a different country.
“It took us months to convince her that the person she was speaking to wasn’t really in love with her.”
How to stay safe when dating online
YOU can remember Get Safe Online #DateSafe tips with the word DATE:
- Don’t rush into an online relationship – get to know the person, not the profile and ask plenty of questions.
- Analyse their profile and check the person is genuine by putting their name, profile pictures or any repeatedly used phrases and the term ‘dating scam’ into your search engine.
- Talk to your friends and family about your dating choices. Be wary of anyone who tells you not to tell others about them.
- Evade scammers by never sending money to, or sharing your bank details with, someone you’ve met online, no matter what reason they give or how long you’ve been speaking to them.
- Stay on the dating site messenger service until you’re confident the person is who they say they are. If you do decide to meet in person, make sure the first meeting is in a public place and let someone else know where you’re going to be.
They deal with all sorts of online fraudsters but Wayne’s speciality is with romance scammers.
He’s been doing it since 2005 and now has a good eye for identifying a fraudsters and where they come from.
“I’d say it was about 50/50 between men and women who get in touch with us,” says Wayne.
“Typically, scammers from Russia target men and ones from West Africa lean more towards women.
“They’re not stupid people either, you have to take them seriously.
“They’ll spend months grooming their victims with emails or phone calls, day and night. They say don’t tell your friends about us, keep them separate from people in their real lives.
“It’s not a case of them saying ‘hello’ when you answer the phone, they’ll call you ‘husband’ and if they have children they’ll put them on the phone with you.
“And then they start asking for small amounts of money for things like credit for their phones, and then it gets bigger.
“They’ll ask for money for a flight or a translator and ask for you to transfer the money through something like Western Union.
“Romance fraud one of the worst frauds. Once the scammer gets someone hooked then they play with them emotionally.”
There are four volunteers from around the world who run the forum-based site and many use pseudonyms to keep their identities safe. There’s Big Al and SlapHappy who’re based in the US and Fire Fly who’s from Austria.
“We’re costing them [the scammers] a lot of money by getting their dating profile accounts closed or frozen and by publishing their details,” Wayne explains.
“That’s why we use fake names and details online. We take protecting our real identity very seriously.”
Why do you become a scam baiter?
WHILE Wayne stumbled into the world of scam baiting, Fire Fly - or Kari-Ann Liebling - starting trying to help others after she fell victim to a scam herself.
Kari-Anne, who’s based in Western Europe, signed up to a dating site after a move to a new country left her feeling lonely.
She got chatting to a guy on the site who ended up scamming her out of about 1,000€ (£890) over three months.
Now, she considers her loss as an “educational fee” and has turned her hand to baiting.
She steers clear of the “trophy” baiting attitude – some forums are dedicated to showing off what you can get a scammer to do, often rewarded with how explicit you can make the conversations – but she does it to help other victims.
“I can dream of a world where there will be international law to punish this worldwide crime.
“In the meantime, I can just try to do my best with all that I can to expose scammers with the hope that it can help someone else before they are scammed.”
What they do isn’t illegal. They bait the scammers with fake dating profiles too as well as by posting “sucker lists” online – lists of email addresses that fraudsters scrape for their own collection – and wait for them to get in touch.
They never make the first contact or it would be entrapment, but they’ve got a reputation for themselves.
“We’ve never handed anyone over to the police,” said Wayne, “but we’ve had law enforcement like the FBI and Interpol have come to us for help, asking how we found someone out.
“And we can carry out searches on email address quickly, whereas the law enforcement have forms to fill in first. We’re not hackers, we just know how to do smart searches.
“You deal with people who are the lowest of low and you really have to believe in what you do.
“It’s a strange hobby to have but everyone’s got one.”
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