Three tech tricks romance scammers use to fool their victims
BY KERRY TOMLINSON, AMPERE NEWS
September 29, 2021
Smooth talk and fake messages of love can lure victims in. But romance scammers also develop and deploy tech tricks to help convince their targets that their elaborate storylines are real.
Here are three key tech tactics that proved very effective in a romance scam case where a woman lost all her money to tech-savvy crooks.
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The Scheme
Long after the scam is over, Elizabeth --- not her real name --- is still shaken.
"He would call me almost every night, except when he said he was on an airplane," she said. "It was a very, very sophisticated scheme."
A ring of criminals posed as a man going by the name 'Michael Lawrence.' He claimed to be the head of an oil and gas company, from Italy and living in the U.S. Not just anywhere in the U.S., but in Georgia not far from Elizabeth herself.
How did she know?
"On Bumble's site it showed him in the same state. It showed him close by," she said.
They met on Bumble, a dating app that requires you to use your location, determined by your Wi-Fi and GPS. The app showed him not only nearby in Georgia, but also in Washington, D.C. at the very moment he said he was speaking at a conference there.
"He actually sent me photographs of a conference that he was at," she said. "He was on a board and he told me all about it. "
But the pictures of Michael Lawrence were stolen from a man named Alexei Sitnikov in Russia. And the story of conferences in D.C. and an international oil and gas business were false.
How did they do it?
Tech Trick #1: App Location
No need to hack the app.
Bumble has a special feature called travel mode where you can set your location to a city you're about to visit for seven days.
The app will say it's in travel mode, but the illusion of location can feel real, a key step in making Elizabeth feel comfortable with Michael's story.
"It's so clever how the scammers can use these platforms and make it so believable," she said. "The scammers have gotten smarter by the minute."
We also found that the alleged criminal ring had two suspected helpers living in Georgia, who may have been able to assist by logging into the app from close to home.
Ampere News asked Bumble about this issue. The company did not respond to questions.
Tech Trick #2: Fake Skype Call
Another tech trick: a Skype call between Elizabeth and Michael.
In what appears to be a growing trend, scammers are using fakes to make victims think they're on a real video call.
Canadian professor Alec Couros says in a YouTube video that romance scammers have used his images many times. They also use his videos, in what the victims believe are real video calls.
"The one convincing moment that they've had is when they saw me on video via Skype. That confused me for a while because obviously i'm not talking to these victims via Skype," he said.
He says the scammers can use tools like ManyCam to play his videos in a Skype call. They may say there are audio or video problems to explain the inability to hold a live video conversation.
"You can see how it might convince the victims even further," he said.
Elizabeth, however, says her video conversation with Michael appeared to be normal, without audio issues. He looked like the fake Michael in his photos, perhaps a little fuzzier than she might have expected. His voice was the same as the man she spoke with almost every day by phone.
"That's why this is just so unbelievable, still, today, to me, that the person in the Skype actually looked like the picture that was on his profile," she said.
But we are in the era of deepfakes, from recreational fake videos on YouTube to cyber crime.
Cyber criminals advertise on the dark web that they can create fake videos for a price. Consumer experts warn people that crooks can use software to change their face, even in a live video.
In one well-known case, a Chinese vlogger used a filter to make her face look younger and more conventionally attractive, but accidentally and dramatically dropped the filter in a livestream, losing thousands of dollars and subscribers.
Tech Trick #3: Fake Bank Website
The final key tech trick: an elaborate fake bank website.
Eventually, Michael claimed he need to buy a multimillion-dollar rig for his oil business. He said he could not do it from the drilling platform where he was working and needed Elizabeth's help.
His "lawyer" showed her first a screenshot of what looked like a real bank site and account, then had her sign in, complete with a special login code to get in.
The long list of transactions in his account matched the things he had said to her about his activities during the past four months together.
"It was so powerful, because I thought, 'How could anybody make this up?'" she said. "It just drew me in even more. It was believable, it was so believable."
When she transferred the money for him, a message popped up on screen saying taxes were due. The man she believed she loved begged her to help him pay the taxes. Finally, she gave in to help.
"I go back to thinking about this so many times, over and over and over, how naive could I have been to fall for this?" she said. "But I did, I gave him my savings and my retirement money. And so they wiped me out. "
Fallout
These tech tricks, combined with deep social engineering, convinced Elizabeth that her love was real, leading to devastating loss --- and not just of money.
"We do get caught up in the fantasy of love. And I did. And it's really painful. I've lost all of my money. So, I'm trying, through family and friends, to get my life back together," she said. "It's been terrible."
In the past, common advice was to ask an online romance to do a video call to verify their identity. That advice may no longer hold true.
However, many would-be victims say they have caught a scammer by asking them to stand up or wave their hands or blow a kiss in the call, which they were unable to do, showing that scammers still use low-end video tricks to hurt people.
In Elizabeth's case, the technological tricks were very effective. But the psychological tricks they used were flat-out brutal. You can see those in our story, Anatomy of a Romance Scam.
