Cupid or conman? Decoding the online dating scam

Last week, 52-year-old Meenu Jain was robbed and murdered in her Delhi home. The suspect was someone she had met on desi dating app QuackQuack. Dinesh Dixit, a debt-ridden realtor, posed as a high-flying businessman to strike a friendship which gradually turned to ‘romance’. A police probe has revealed that Dixit’s modus operandi was preying on married women.As more people go online looking for sex, love and friendship, dating apps and social networking sites have become hunting grounds for conmen. Here are five kinds of dating scams to watch out for…
1 | Russian Biwi Con
The Russian Wives scam is a classic. A pretty young thing befriends an older man online. After chatting over a period of time, the “woman” shows an interest in coming to India to know more about Bollywood or Indian history, but says she can’t because of lack of funds. Altaf Halde, global business head of cyber security firm Network Intelligence, says that by this time, the man starts feeling sorry for her. “Then in a fit of generosity, he transfers a sum of money for the travel.” The transfers are requested through a service like Western Union rather than a bank account so that tracking the recipient becomes difficult. The next day, the man will get an image in his mailbox, showing the woman connecting with the man’s wife on a social media app, and a blackmail note threatening to tell all if the man doesn’t part with more money. Most people who are duped don’t even go to the police. Senior inspector of Pune’s cybercrime cell Radhika Phadke says that every week, they get at least one application from someone who has fallen victim to an online dating fraud. “But very few come forward to lodge an FIR.”
2 | Proposal turns extortion
This one targets widowed or single people looking for a second chance at companionship. Scammers usually pose as doctors or military personnel as that inspires trust, sometimes even introducing other “family members” to give their story credibility. As in the case of 44-year-old Hyderabad-based divorcee Haritha (name changed), who joined a matrimonial portal and met a ‘’doctor’’ online. They exchanged numbers. Before long, the chats became longer and more frequent. The doctor claimed to be living with his daughter in the UK and told Haritha that he’d lost his wife in a car crash. One day, he told her that he had booked tickets for India to meet her. “He told her that he wanted to meet her and her family to officially propose marriage,” says S Harinath, ACP cybercrime Rachakonda. Haritha later got a call from a woman from the customs department saying he was carrying a lot of cash and gifts with him, and had been taken into custody for money laundering. “The customs officer asked her to send money in phases to various account, to secure his release. She sent over Rs 5 lakh, but later realised she had been cheated when there was no call from the customs officers and the doctor she had been talking to for weeks,” says the ACP. The case was finally cracked when the man was arrested from Noida. Hyderabad alone reported 11 such cases of fraud in four months.
3 | Pretty woman is a man
This one involves a sex change or, at least, a virtual one. Last year, 29-year-old Bengaluru-based engineer Suman Reddy posed as a woman on a classifieds app called Locanto which is often used to pick up female escorts. By the time the Guntur police arrested him, Reddy had cheated over 500 people, making off with several lakhs. The excuses for asking for money ranged from medical emergencies and sudden travel plans to a credit card getting lost or stolen. He would always insist on a digital payment. Last June, a software engineer in Bengaluru was duped of Rs 60 lakh by a “woman” who struck a rapport and then asked for Rs 30,000 for her father’s treatment at a Kolkata hospital. The requests kept coming.
4 | I-have-your-sex-tape-scam
Cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab says a common scam involves conmen who claim to be living abroad in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia. After a courtship period, the scammer asks the victim to connect via webcam and “chat”. The fraudster’s webcam is mysteriously broken, but with a combination of flattery and persistence, he convinces his “partner” to partially disrobe or perform other intimate acts. The scammer then claims to have made a video recording and threatens to post it unless the victim sends money.
5 | Making Gay men pay
Besides lonely middle-aged men, widows and divorcees, romance scammers often target the queer community as they are more reluctant to go to the police. They are often lured on dates, drugged with a spiked drink and robbed of cash and jewellery. But sometimes, it’s worse. As in the case of Mumbai-based Ashish, who was on a work trip to Delhi last July when he met a match on a dating app. He decided to meet with his date in the middle of the afternoon near Connaught Place only to find another guy turn up. “The man said he was part of an escort service and demanded Rs 20,000. When I refused, he started abusing me,” Ashish says. The man was joined by two others who physically assaulted him and tried to snatch his chain and phone. Ashish kicked one of the gang members and ran for his life. A shaken Ashish told a few close friends about the incident after returning to Mumbai. “After I spoke about it, I realised that many people in the gay community had faced similar situations,” he says. Ishaan Sethi, who co-founded the Delta app to give the LGBT community a safer way to date, says that though scams have reduced after the repeal of Section 377, cases of extortion and blackmail continue to exist. “Earlier people were scared of getting arrested. Now that fear is alleviated but there is still the fear of public shaming.”
How to spot the scammer

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With inputs from Aditi Mallick in Hyderabad and Mihir Tanksale in Pune