Securing Sexuality is the podcast and conference promoting sex positive, science based, and secure interpersonal relationships. We give people tips for safer sex in a digital age. We help sextech innovators and toy designers produce safer products. And we educate mental health and medical professionals on these topics so they can better advise their clients. Securing Sexuality provides sex therapists with continuing education (CEs) for AASECT, SSTAR, and SASH around cyber sexuality and social media, and more.
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Sean Gallagher is Principal Threat Researcher for Sophos X-Ops. Prior to joining Sophos, he was an information security and technology journalist for over 30 years, including 10 as information security and national security editor for Ars Technica.
this week's guest: Sean gallagherUnveiling the Dark World of Romance Scams
In today's digital age, online dating has become a popular way to meet new people and potentially find love. However, alongside the genuine romances that blossom online, there is a dark world of romance scams lurking in the shadows. These scams prey on vulnerable individuals, exploiting their emotions and ultimately leaving them financially devastated. In this article, we will delve into the world of romance scams, explore how to identify them, and provide essential tips on protecting yourself online.
Understanding Romance Scams: Romance scams are sophisticated schemes that aim to gain the trust and affection of their targets, ultimately leading to financial exploitation. Scammers often create fake profiles on dating websites or social media platforms, portraying themselves as attractive, successful individuals looking for love. They invest time and effort into building relationships with their victims, often engaging in lengthy conversations and showering them with attention and affection. Red Flags to Look Out For: While it can be difficult to spot a romance scammer, there are several red flags to watch out for:
Protecting Yourself Online:
Reporting Scammers: If you suspect you have encountered a romance scammer, it's crucial to report them to the appropriate authorities. Contact your local law enforcement agency and file a complaint. Additionally, report the scammer to the dating website or social media platform where you encountered them. By doing so, you not only protect yourself but also help prevent others from falling victim to the same scam. The world of online dating can be a wonderful way to meet new people and potentially find love. However, it's essential to be aware of the dark world of romance scams that lurks online. By familiarizing yourself with the red flags, protecting your personal information, and trusting your instincts, you can reduce the risk of falling victim to these scams. Stay vigilant, stay informed, and stay safe in the online dating world. Key Concepts:
Hello and welcome to Securing Sexuality. The podcast where we discussed the intersection of intimacy and information security. I'm Wolf Goerlich. He's a hacker, and I'm Stefani Goerlich. She is a sex therapist. And together we're going to discuss what safe sex looks like in a digital age.
Um, but before we do that I have a question, huh? Not to be that person. I know that. You know, I'm a sex therapist. Trained to help people deal with jealousy. Sure. I'm a little curious about something. Who the hell have you been texting? You've been texting a lot recently. Well, you promise not to be jealous. I mean, I said I'm trained to help people deal with jealousy. Let's see if you give me the answer and I'll tell you if I'm not jealous. Well, I've got a new friend. Her name is Naomi. Um, she runs a beauty and fashion start-up in San Francisco, which is so weird. She texted me out of nowhere. She thought I was Rowena. And I thought she actually was talking as Rowena because we know we got our friend Rowena, friend of the show. I was like, Hey, Rowena, how's it going? She was like, No, no, no. I'm Naomi. Are you Rowena? And it was so weird. But we've been talking back and forth. She seems lovely. Only you would make friends with a total stranger, like only you would get a wrong number text message and decide your friends. Now. Well, she feels she feels really bad about it. And she told us, Hey, next time we're in San Francisco, she wants to buy me a cup of coffee or tea to make up for, uh, for the missed text, which I thought was lovely. I mean, I have issues with the idea of you meeting up with some random woman in San Francisco. Well, I was going to bring you along, but it is weird that I'm getting all these texts, right? Like, hey, and there's so many, like, wrong number texts these days. And so I thought, Hey, you know who we should talk to? We should talk to Sean Gallagher to help us sort out why this is happening. How's it going, Sean? Hey, How's it going? Great. Hey, Sean, I'm glad you're here because I need an objective third party to tell me whether or not I should be jealous or not. Well, um, Wolf has encountered, uh, what we refer to as a lure for a type of scam known as pig butchering, which is derived from the Chinese phrase Sha Zupan, which means pig butchering plate. Essentially, um, it's a type of scam that started in China in 2020 or so uh, has gone global during the pandemic, and it's it it's really destructive. Um, it it's it Drink drags people in through, uh, a lure of romance or friendship and then works its way towards separating people from their money. You would be the person to ask about this as the principal threat researcher at Sophos. I know you're at the X Ops group, right? You focus in on information sharing, public facing research, and first that phrase pig butchering surprises me. Like I thought when I heard pig butchering, I thought maybe it was a Tik tok dance trend or hanging out with Stefani. I thought maybe it was a sex position, like you switch from cowgirl to Pig butcher. Now that one Really. That one didn't work. Uh, slasher film, but no, this is actually like this comes from Chinese, and now they're targeting over text messages. Right? So pig butchering is actually a part of the process or what they've called part of the process of these scams and that you're fattening up the victim, as in getting them to contribute more and more money to the scam. And then you then butcher them, separate them from their money, Uh, in a very, very, very drastic way. Um, and then you keep going back to harvest more if you can. Um, so you know, a lot of this is around crypto now, um, because that's the easiest way to get people separated from their money is to have them turn it into crypto. Um, we have seen scams that are more oriented towards commodities trading or investing in different markets. Uh, but they're fake markets. Um, and we've seen these all started out originally as gambling scams. So, um, and there's still a number of those operating in Southeast Asia, particularly targeting the Chinese world, the Chinese speaking world. Um so these these illegal casinos or marginally legal casinos that were set up on the border in Myanmar and other places bordering China targeting, uh, people in China where it is illegal to gamble. Um, they were set up initially as a way of of generating a lot of of money by organised crime. And then they found an even easier way to make money was to totally rig the deck and to get people to believe that they had inside information regarding these casinos and or they were friends with the person who was, uh, doing the dealing on black deck blackjack tables and things like that, Um, and getting them to bet more and more and showing them a fake profit within the gambling environment they were in, but then never actually have any real money. They just taking the money and running with it. Um, it's gotten more and more sophisticated as it's got international. Uh, there's more use of, uh, things like a I to convince people that the person they're dealing with is actually someone that's actually romantically interested in them. Um, both in terms of a IA I generated imagery and a I generated text to make the fluency difference between the people who are doing the scamming and the victim less apparent. Um, And, uh, it's been, you know, in the US in 2022 it was worth about $2 billion worth of fraud in terms of how much was taken from people. And it's gonna be more in 2023 and it continues to grow. Now we are recording this on Valentine's Day. Of course, whenever you listen to this, it will be long past Valentine's Day, as is podcasting scheduling. We're recording this on Valentine's Day, and so you know, my my head is on on the romance side, right? Like, Are you? Tell not Not that I would step out on you, Stefani with a bot. But are you telling me, my friend Naomi, my my sweet little friend in San Francisco who's a beautician could be like an A I bot could be part of this like Stepford Internet, uh, is likely a person of either gender, uh, who has been handed a phone and a keyboard, several phones and several keyboards working in AAA pig butchering compound in a country like Cambodia or Thailand or Myanmar or Laos, uh, where they have been lured by the promise of a job and are told once they get there and their passport is taken away from them, that they need to run so many scams before they can leave and make so much money before they can live. And they are using G chat G BT images that may have been edited with a I, um sometimes they actually have, uh, actresses who provide all of the the images and actually make voice calls, uh, but are increasingly seeing deep fake video being used in these sorts of things? Uh, where they have an image of someone that they have turned into a video, and they use, uh, generated voice over it to make it look like it's a an actual woman talking to you. Um, this is in part to help them get away from the fact that almost all of these lures have been, you know, with Asian women, uh, in the past, and and so you know, it's become a trait of these things that, you know, there's this Chinese woman who suddenly wants to talk to me or this this Malaysian woman who suddenly wants to talk to me or a Vietnamese girl who suddenly wants to talk to me. Um or an Asian guy, Um, had a recent victim, uh, who came to me when he saw some of my research. Uh, he was approached through a dating app, uh, by someone who claimed to be German. Um, and it was only when he got into a situation where he actually had a voice conversation with a person that he said, Seems like you don't have a German accent. Seems like you have a Chinese accent. Um, but that didn't still didn't, you know, register completely and get him out of the scam. Uh, in fact, there were times when the person dropped into flat out Chinese characters and chat, and the person was like, Why did you send me this stuff in Chinese and said, Oh, I was talking with a friend of mine in China and I was using translate, uh, as an excuse for the the dropped Chinese text, even though the drop Chinese text when you ran it through translate was exactly what the person is trying to say in English to them at the same time. So, um, the thing is, is that the thing is is that, um they don't just use text messages they use dating apps. They use other apps as well. Where you're building, uh, a social relationship. You're building AAA relationship based on trust. Um, to start these things off, Um, in fact, we've had victims who were approached through air BNB because they had a rental property. They wanted to rent out over a air BNB. And someone came to them and said they wanted to rent the property, but then started talking to them about paying in in crypto and then sort of say, Hey, well, we could do this without using Airbnb, and I can also I can show you this great way to make crypto and then getting sucked into this investment scheme. But primarily it's a romance scam, and we've seen that dating back to 2020. So I think that what you've said is really important, especially for people in the world. In Michigan, social workers are required as a part of maintaining our licence to do a certain number of hours, uh, continuing education on human trafficking specifically, and it gets so frustrating for me because this almost always takes the form of sex work and sex trafficking. And that's not what most human trafficking is. Michigan is a huge agricultural state. We have a tonne of labour trafficking, and what you're describing is a form of digital human trafficking, and nobody's talking about that. Nobody's thinking about people working in fraud farms whose passports are being held and who are being told. We're not letting you leave until you've done XY or Z who thought that they were coming over for an entirely different kind of job. And I think that looking at this practise through the lens of human trafficking is really important, because it's not something that people in my world often think about or really even know about. And I think that changes the nature of how people would think about these scams. If they realised that it's not usually some random dude in Tennessee that's individually conning their client specifically out of maliciousness and like sociopathy that it is trafficking victims being forced to do this sort of mass scale, Yes, and and and so I mean and these are very complex rings that do this sort of thing because they have AAA network of fake shell companies that advertise through normal channels for jobs, Um, and often they will have people intercept. Look for people who are looking for work on LinkedIn or on indeed or things like that overseas and for, uh, with other companies and then redirect them and say, Hey, we've got a job for you, but you need to come to Cambodia for it. These rings started really scaling up during covid when economically Southeast Asia was in a really bad place. The whole world was in a really bad place. Uh, but there weren't a lot of the people in Malaysia, uh, Singapore, Other places that were dependent upon global trade were having a hard time finding jobs that were paying well enough. And they were being offered these opportunities to come work in a what would seem to be a software company's data centre or a software company's telemarketing centre, or work as a translator for an IT company or work for a company as a bookkeeper or something like that that were gonna be There were very high paying jobs relative to where they were. They had to relocate to another country. Um, and these compounds are set up in places where there was a lot of Chinese investment in casinos and in tourist spots that were really hurt by Covid because people weren't coming to visit them. And Chinese organised crime came in and said, Hey, we have a way of making you be able to make your payments on your debt that you owe the Chinese government from the belt and road initiative. Uh, if you just let us come in and set up these these these compounds in your facilities, we can make, we can. We can help you make money. Um, in Myanmar, the government, the the the junta has made money off of these things. The junta has been involved in backing these operations in these regions of Myanmar that border China and, uh, and and Chi. The China had put enough pressure recently to have one of the one of the party officials associated with the junta who was a former governor of that state of the governor, governor of this self autonomous region in in in northeast Myanmar, arrested and extradited to China because of the level of kidnapping of Chinese citizens that was going on to drag them, bring them across the border to work in these facilities. Um, there's a a nonprofit organisation in Cambodia that is dedicated almost entirely to helping the victims of these things get get repatriated back to the countries they were taken from because people who escaped from these have don't they don't have their passports, they have no money. They have no way of getting home. So it's a huge trafficking problem. Um, it's be, I think, that eventually the trafficking piece of it's gonna fade away a little bit as more, more reliance is put on a I tools, but also as this becomes a more global phenomenon, the way these scams operate because we're also seeing the same scam patterns being picked up by the people. The places we've seen social engineering scams in large scale in the past, like Nigeria and West Africa, where we you seen where there's been generations of, you know, the old Yahoo boy type romance scam going on for forever, and they've sort of perfected the techniques for romance scams, and they're taking this model that the Chinese have developed and they're running with it. I'm a sex therapist. I'm a relationship therapist, I think in terms of human relationships, and it's interesting to me you mentioned that so many of these are based in Asia and are using Asian faces. Asian names, Asian voices for these scams because I feel like that plays into a lot of sort of Western fetishization of Asian people. I could see guys here being more likely to fall for the idea of this sweet little woman halfway around the world who just needs him to swoop in and rescue her in a way that they might not believe if she looked like, um a New Yorker, for example. And I'm curious who usually falls for these kinds of scams like, How are they targeting people? How are they identifying Who a good mark for? For I don't even like saying pig butchering like I'm not a vegetarian, but that's just such a gross term. How such a violent term, even that I I'm curious how they decide who they're going to attack. And before you answer that show, I'll tell you, you're framing there. Stefani is so good because as I'm listening like originally, I'm like, OK, this person is clearly a scam, but I'm like, Wait a minute, they could be human trafficked. Maybe I should send them just a little bit of money so they can help, like, meet their quota. Like, get this poor person home. Naomi, I don't know what your name is, but can I send you a couple bucks so you can get off the hook? I think you're framing there It is very good, right? There's There's a natural inclination of many people to want to to be kind that gets taken advantage of these scams. Well, the the targeting varies widely, right. And and, you know, we we see a couple of different kinds of patterns. But I, I have to tell you that every age, every demographic I have has been involved in this sort of thing. I've had everyone from a, uh, a woman who was a Polish university student to, uh, 75 year old retired, uh, professor, uh, other people, you know, in everywhere in between, um, the main vulnerability that they prey on is vulnerability itself is the need for human contact, right? And so that's part of the lure of the text message is that when they get you into a conversation, they are winnowing you out of the crowd by whether you respond to a random text message. Uh, how if you respond positively to their re their replies, Um, whether you how much you engage with them and the more you engage with them, the more they feel they've got you hooked, and they're gonna bring you into this other conversation eventually. And it's usually by taking you from a text message over to a WhatsApp or to a telegram, uh, for a secure conversation, Uh, where the phone company can't watch it. Um, but the thing is, is they all prey on human vulnerability. They prey on human need for contact. And that's why they love dating apps so much. And that's why they love social media. Especially in these days. I've I've gotten words from from, uh, Facebook, Uh, from from X. Twitter, uh, gotten straight requests on WhatsApp uh that came from wherever they harvest phone numbers from, um, but I've also gotten a lot of these text messages as well, and it all depends upon how the ring is. Sort of like built the script for how they do things. The gender that they use for approaching people and the personality they take to approaching people is fluid. Based on who the victim is. So if they say I found a 60 year old gay male in Washington DC and they have set up an account on a dating platform where they see this person they will present as a gay younger man in the DC area, living in DC, going to, you know, but from someplace else. And, uh, if they are looking for, uh, you know, there's there have been victims who were who are women who were approached by younger men, uh, who were friendly to them and talked them up and gave the impression of being sort of like the dream guy. Um uh, one woman I talked to recently, uh, the Attackers used stolen photos from an instagram profile from a man in California to create a persona of a successful business guy who was also very athletic, who who was interested in her, uh, they do a very sophisticated job of building up, uh, characters. They ca they call them. They they I've got to build a character for myself to play. This is like playing in a role playing game. They build up this sophisticated profile of a persona they're going to play and they have sets of them. And they have images they collect to go along with them, and some of them are Asian. But many of them are not Asian. And, um, the ones that tend to be played. You know, that Tend that I that I have interacted with that were used women who are Asian as the lure. Uh, in one case, they actually had a woman who was essentially on staff as their as their person to talk to victims they would do. Scheduled video calls with victims would generate all sorts of content. And they had this huge sob story that they would give about. You know, first of all, talk about how successful they are in business but how wounded they are in romance, right? How they were divorced because they caught their husband cheating with a friend. Uh, and they they they don't trust men anymore. And you're the only male friend I have Now they would say in conversation, and, you know, and and I want to get to and and getting to know you so well, um uh, there was this one that I engaged with, uh, the scammer I engaged with last year who, um, presented as a woman who worked in the winery business in Vancouver, British Columbia, and said that he owned a, uh, a timeshare, uh, in Florida that she wanted me to come visit with her, uh, and, uh, presented all this information about the winery she worked at that she was a a first presented herself as being the owner of, um, But then she presented to the owner of the of the sales side, um, actual winery. Um, and they had set up a, uh, a voice over IP phone account in Vancouver using the name of the winery to get a location that, uh uh, on on Apple maps that linked to where this person said they were. So they had built up this really sophisticated background of this, uh, that would be convincing to a lot of people if we just doing just basic Google searching, uh, to convince them that this was an actual person and actually in the business, I had all these photos. The problem was that I did some open source intelligence work with the photos you sent and the photo she sent of herself initially or was said of her initially was of her standing in a bar in Phnom Penh in a hotel in Phnom Penh. And, you know, you blow the photo up a little bit and all the all the wine, all the all the bottles and the liquor cabinet behind her have Chinese characters on them. And, uh, photos of her selfie photos of her sitting in a in a Lamborghini in a in a garage somewhere. Uh, yeah, lots of photos taken in, in, in, in underground garages, um, to not show the location. But, you know, presenting all of this, this this external look of wealth and offering to, like, show you how to do it too, because you want to have a closer personal relationship, not necessarily for for for per, you know, for becoming rich, but also saying if you make this money, we can get together and we can spend a lot of time together, and that works on people of all sorts of walks of life, especially when you like. They're they're people who have had health problems, uh, who are isolated and don't have friends nearby, especially during covid. A lot of people during covid had no personal contact with anybody, and outreaches like these were taking advantage of all their their desperate need for human contact. And they make them really, you know, for for somebody who isn't, like, trained in looking at fraud and trained at looking at at sort of like how people can build up personas for these types of frauds, it can be very convincing. And, uh, you know, especially. But, you know, I have found that there was a a very large spike as far as the demographics go in men between the ages of 4055 wait a minute. Who were who were recently divorced or who were, you know, were were unmarried who, uh, were generally successful people in their profession. But we're not necessarily savvy to say Bitcoin crypto investment or in some cases, they were people who were who were very much attuned to crypto investment and because the way they went after these things sometimes made it look like a legitimate crypto crypto investment scheme. So, for example, the one that we've seen more recently that's really as it has evolved, is these defi scams where they like, say, we have a a defi mining operation AAA Liquidity Pool that you just have to link your wallet to and you'll just make money. And that is sort of how liquidity mining works, sort of. But, um, it's, you know, these things. They were basically linking with a contract that allowed a smart contract that allowed the scammers to take all the money out of their wallets. They were dropping more, cry crypto into their wallets and were making a profit and then breaking it all back along with whatever they put into it and for even more cautious, uh, more more savvy people who, like, get an idea what crypto is and maybe a little afraid of it because of all the weirdness has gone on with different exchanges. This was more convincing, especially since it didn't require them to do anything other than open up a crypto wallet on their phone and link it to a website. When you're talking about like photographing in garages, when you're talking about setting up fake numbers with, you know, call back information that's routing to wineries. When we're talking about all this, this really changes my conceptualization of this right because when I get this text Obviously, I knew Naomi wasn't real. For the record, right? For the record, love, don't be Don't be V to me But I really thought it was like one person doing this. It sounds like it's gonna take quite a team. What is the the team look like behind one of these scams? These teams can be, uh, you know, nodes of, like, five or 10 people in a larger organisation. Um, but behind them, there's sort of a back office operation that handles things like providing the phone numbers, setting up the Google voice accounts or the other voice over IP accounts that link that are used on the phones to set up the chat, uh, setting up the websites that they use to run the scams that are either or or the apps. In some cases, they write total totally, uh, passable in the app store Apple and Google apps. They get past, go, get past APP review, and they have a team that develops those and they and they have people who do stuff on the back end to swap out the interface once it's deployed. Right? So that's really technically sophisticated, right? There's a back office that does all those things. They also handle all the money laundering and setting up, uh, different shell a shell companies to have bank accounts to process the money being cashed out from different crypto exchanges. Then the front office is these teams of people who were brought in, and many of them were people who were trafficked. Um, they're working in essentially, if you can. If you remember the movie, uh, any any movie, like a boiler room stock trading operation in it, right? It looks kind of like that, except with lots of computer monitors and lots and lots of mobile phones that have been set up to be used for these scams. And there can be 2030 people in a room, even more who are just doing keyboarding texting messages to people. There are some people who do the texting, the initial texting in the conversation. There are people who prepare these personas, build the personas that they're going to use. There are people who then take over the chat once they've gotten past the the initial text messaging and take it over to a shared WhatsApp, or telegram account so multiple people can maintain the contact with the victim over time, and they're all working from the same character sheet. Essentially, Um, and then there's a manager who's watching over them. Everything is monitored all the time. Um, and it's and And when it gets to the point where they're ready to pull the trigger on getting you to invest in the scheme, they have screenshots that they've got circles and arrows on that they send you to get you to do what they need you to do to get connected to the scam. And, um, there are people there as security to make sure nobody leaves, and, uh, and and and they. And if you don't follow the script as a scammer, they give these scripts. So they give people that give them guidelines on how to interact with people. If you don't follow the rules, you don't follow the scripts. People get shocked with cattle prods. People get beaten, um, and and they're brought back into line. And when things go off course with the conversation, like, for example, when I say Hey, I know I noticed that you're using this phone number that belongs to this particular voice over IP user operator that I know has been associated with scams in the past. Are you Are you doing this? And, uh, the people who are up at the top will jump into the chat, and we'll just and we will react to you. Um, I called out one recently, uh, because I got tired of it. I was I was I. I was basically I've been collecting, uh, data on how these people operate for so long. I had another one come in, and I just didn't know I didn't want to deal with it. I sort of, like, brushed it off and said, you know, look, I, I sent him a link to a Wall Street Journal article about, uh, pig butchering. And I said, I'm gonna report this phone number to the carrier and to law enforcement, and they text me back after googling my phone number. Are you sure you wanna do that? Sean, you don't want your wife and then my wife's name to regret any decisions you make. Wow. That spooky. Yeah. So? So I've been going through and clearing out all of my, uh, outlying people finder, uh, data that I found on the internet. Um which, you know there's enough of because I was, you know, having being an ex journalist. Uh, my name is everywhere, right? So, uh, I have to go through all these all these accounts and all these, uh, people finder paid people finders searches to, like, opt out so that that doesn't happen to me again. But yeah, it's it's they they will apply that kind of pressure to people wherever they need to. And it's important to remember that the organised crime groups that are behind a lot of these things. So, like I said, tied to the Myanmar regime in some regards, uh, with the ones that are operating in Myanmar, uh, many of them are tied to the Chinese triads to organised crime that goes back centuries. Um, yeah, there are people who you know would not be over. You know, say harvesting your organs for profit. Um, and others are tied to other criminal organisations that are, you know, in in mainland China, known as black societies that are sort of like a lower key version of that more, more less structured than the triads. Some are tied to US operations of of those O, so there was a a bus that just happened in California, where Chinese and U citizens were involved in money laundering. For one of these operations, uh, in California and in Illinois running shell companies. Um, so they have a global reach, Um, and and now those the types of organisations that do these are diversifying because the people who develop the kits that are being used to run these rings are selling them to everybody on marketplaces. So the technology base, the stuff in the back end. It's really S really difficult to do that's being turned into the same sort of thing as fishing kits. Right? These these packaged pieces of code that I can load up on a website someplace with a little bit of configuration and run the same scam my own way. The idea of organ trafficking really takes the whole pig butchering thing to a whole new level, and I really just I can't get over how uncomfortable the terminology makes me feel. I mean, it's just such a viscerally violent description for something that happens online and probably feels very sterile to the people that are doing it. Um, but it doesn't feel that way to the people who are having their emotions manipulated. And I'm curious. How can somebody know that this is happening? What warning signs Should they look for what tells? Might there be that can let somebody know? Um, funny story, Wolf. I don't even know if you know the story. But when my first husband and I separated, um, he was very quick to jump on the dating apps and very quick to find somebody who was, um, also in the military and was stationed overseas, and they bonded very quickly over their shared military status. And she was stationed, I think, in Guam. And it felt very real and very authentic for him until she hit him up for money. And it wasn't until that first ask was made that he realised he was being played so short of that. Because for some people that ask, the emotional investment is already there and that that request might not be the red flag. So how can somebody tell maybe before that first request is made that the person they're talking to might not be legit? Well, so the first thing is, if you engage with somebody through a dating app and they say, Let's take our conversation off to WhatsApp. That should be your first red flag or any place for that matter. Um, WhatsApp and T and telegram, um, anytime somebody wants to take a conversation private early on in a conversation that was started through either an accidental what an accidental S MS message Or through, uh, meeting cute in a dating app. Um, before you physically meet them, you should immediately they should immediately set a red flag if they're trying to take you off to a private chat platform. Um, the main reason they move people over is there are two main reasons they move people over to those platforms, and that is one they're end to end, encrypted and can't be moderate, moderated without one user or the other being involved. And the second is because they can be shared across multiple devices and allow multiple people to interact with you. And so the first red flag anybody should. The biggest red flag anybody should see is they wanna take me over to WhatsApp after having a five minute conversation and text, either on the dating app or on S MS or in social media. Um, you know, you should be careful about people who say that they are living in an area but don't have a phone number that is in that area, right? So if you look at the phone number associated with a text message or if you look at a phone number associated with A with a WhatsApp account, uh, and the area code doesn't match up with a geographic area where that person should be from, I mean, it's It's more difficult to do that now because people move with cell phones. And so this the area code doesn't usually Ma doesn't as often match up with where they are, uh, and and there are often plausible explanations for why that? But But if somebody says they're in Canada and they give you a phone number that has a a New Orleans area code, you should be concerned. You should that that should be a warning sign. Sometimes you can do a search on an image. For example, I got sent an image on a recent one, and I put it in a Google image search, and I found 30 LinkedIn accounts that were using the same image as a profile image, and they were all compromised. LinkedIn accounts, LinkedIn, accounts that had been activated, Uh, 78 years ago. Uh, that may have been abandoned or may have been breached. Uh, when the Lincoln password leak happened a while back, um, and they had been recently modified with this new image. Um, with contact information changed and so that so That's a sure way to see that somebody is doing something they should be doing. If there's any. I, um that is something being used by multiple people, right? Um, but, you know, the the the thing to keep in mind over all of these things is that they follow a very specific beat to how they do things. So if you're approached by someone and something feels a little bit weird about how they speak, speak English, especially if you know you're a native English speaker and you're approached by somebody who claims to be living in the United States, but doesn't seem to have a real grasp on, uh, on local culture things or doesn't is very vague about where they live, uh is or gives sort of weird messages about, you know, the they would indicate that they're not in the same geographic area. They say they're from right. You need to ask a whole bunch of questions of people in that sort of situation. You establish things that identify where they are, who they are. Um, somebody says that they Oh, I live here now, but I used to live here, and that's why I have a phone number from South Africa. Uh, that's probably not a good sign. Right? Um, you want to, you know, and And if if the conversation ever, suddenly, suddenly and strangely turns towards Oh, I gotta get I'm I'm I just finished up my crypto transactions for the day. Or, you know, I'm making all this money doing crypto trading. I'm making all this money on the gold market or things like that randomly out of nowhere. All right. Um, there's obviously this is another big red flag, right? So that's what most of the way most of these scams work is that they try to instantly introduce the idea of the scam. The scams core into conversation during daily conversation. Um, anybody who's like sending you lots of pictures of, like, material goods that they seem that They seem to have bought, uh, to, like, show off their wealth. Be very aus stacious about their last wealth. That doesn't necessarily match up with the vibe you're getting off of them. Or, like, for example, uh, one of the things that I've seen a lot recently is they send So one of the scammers was sending me their their images harvested off of a Korean models instagram claiming that they were this woman who was from Korea but was living in the United States because they got divorced and their aunt had them move to live with them in the United States. And they're rebuilding their fashion industry, their fashion business in the US, and they would share these photos. I'm at the golf course now, and it's images that were taken from this Korean models Instagram and they and there were other images that were sent like, Oh, I you know, and and suddenly also, they have these weird, uh, charitable things they do like I'm gonna spend the day at the at the, uh, at the retirement home, and they're sending pictures of, like, a birthday of a of a of a grandmother at a at a nursing facility getting a birthday cake that have no connection to what you know about this person. Um, and that's another thing. I did an image search, and it was like there was this Twitter account that had been set up that had all of this. All these images that were from other places that have been gathered together, sort of a as a bank of activities that that person was going to do every day. Um, and they're just taking these images and throw them in it. You just have to, like, ask questions about Does this make sense that this person will be doing this? Uh, what with this? What is this person's relationship with this situation? Why are they doing this? Um, images.google.com searches are are are great. They're not gonna find everything. Um, but especially as a I starts to get introduced into things as well. Um, but, you know, the the first thing is, you know, does this feel like, you know, you have to make you have to get a feel for Does this feel like I'm being taken off of a place where I am safe to have a conversation that dating app. Uh, Social Media, Other place where I can report this to someplace that is a dark alley WhatsApp telegram. And if that's happening, if they're trying to move, you hurry along. That way, you know, I'm gonna say, 99% of the time you're being you're being scammed. I think your guidance there is really good, right? The the The thing that I always say is if you get that tingle, that evidence does not match the story to which you think you're acting in. Follow that tingle. And oftentimes people get that tingle and they're like, Oh, well, maybe I just misunderstood, right? We we get really caught up in the story that we're being told and we tell ourselves and we ignore that evidence. So I think that's a a really good point. Now, I. I have, of course, with this person. I checked the telephone number to make sure that they were really in San Francisco. I did do that. I knew that one. But, uh, all the arrests, I think are are really good tips for anyone who thinks they're getting scammed. What happens when it happens? So because of the work, that stuff and I do. We get a lot of people reach out to us. Um, few months back, a friend of us reached out a friend of a friend and they said, Hey, uh, one of our friends got, uh this wrong number. And next thing I know, they racked up six figures in Cryptocurrency Investment, and it's all gone. Um, how how can I help them get that money back? And I was like, um, I don't think you can, friend, But is there anything you can do? Not a lot. Uh, first thing that they should do is talk to law enforcement. So the Secret Service and the FBI both investigate this type of crime. Um, unfortunately, a lot of it is under the cap for a lot of federal investigations. However, when taken as a whole, if that information is presented and they are working and they have enough evidence to go after these rings, that might help. We've had some crypto recovered by law enforcement by going to the exchanges and freezing accounts. But that has to happen very quickly. These organisations are very fast in how they take money out of these environments. Uh, take Cryptocurrency out of these environments and turn it into cash and move it through different banking systems to launder it. And, uh, in the case of one victim I talked to who lost, uh, substantial amount of money not quite six figures, but very close. Um, his money was cashed out through a bank in Hong Kong almost immediately. And that's the end of that transaction from a law enforcement perspective because they can't. There's no Cooper operation between China and the US currently on crypt on cybercrime. So, uh, or other types of crime. So there's not gonna be any agency to agency collaboration and going after whoever was behind that bank account the the rule. The rule is essentially if you don't act within the hours to either. You know, if you've done a wire transfer to somebody through your bank and get your bank to claw back as quickly as possible, or if you report a transaction to law enforcement or to a crypto exchange as quickly as possible. There's virtually no chance of you ever seeing that money again, and I actually had to tell people that over and over again, it's heartbreaking. Um, there is an organisation, Uh, in the US called the Cybercrime Support Network. They are doing, uh, actual social work with people who've been victims of this cybercrime as well. They have resources to help people connect people with law enforcement, uh, and and to understand what these types of crimes are. But once the crime has happened, there is very little that can be done other than trying to help people not fall for it again. And one of the things that is really remarkable that I've heard from people who work with folks in this space is that people who fall for these types of romance scams often bounce back into another romance scam because it's similar to being coming out of an abusive relationship once they have been abused, they are looking for somebody to talk to about the abuse they've been through and the people who and often they find themselves bending the ear of somebody who is, in fact, another romance scammer. Uh, and I saw that with one of the victims I dealt with. The victim had been romance, scammed on Instagram twice prior to them, falling victim to a pig butching scam, and was talking about the romance scams with the pig butcher, and the Big butcher was trying to give him advice on how to get their money back. So there's a lot of social work that needs to be done around the back end of these things, because, yes, people are gonna fall for these things. But then they're gonna fall for them again unless they are, unless they learn the lessons emotionally as well as intellectually about what happened to them. And and one of the things that's fascinating about that is that that is true across the board. I I'm teaching a class in sexual trauma and trauma informed care right now. And one of the themes that keeps coming up as we move from topic to topic is the fact that once somebody has been victimised once, they are more likely to be victimised again, whether we're talking about sexual assault or online romance scams, and so that psychoeducational piece is so important. Thank you for bringing that, uh, because I think it can be very validating for people in my world to hear that the technologists in your world recognise the need for collaboration in that area, and that's part of why I was so excited to have you on today. And I wanna thank you for spending the last hour talking to us. It was a fascinating conversation. I learned a lot. I still don't like the idea of pig butchering. I'm gonna ask any and all scammers out there that might be listening to this podcast to consider a nicer, friendlier name for what you're doing to people you know. Either stop scamming them or just be like cuddlier about it. Come up with a better name And, um, with that, you know, thank you for listening. Whether you're a scammer or not. Thank you for tuning into securing sexuality. Your source for the information you need to protect yourself and your relationships. Securing sexuality is brought to you by the Bound Together Foundation a 501 C three nonprofit From the bedroom to the cloud. We're here to help you navigate safe sex and digital age. Be sure to check out our website securing sexuality, um, for links to more information about the topics we've discussed here today, as well as updates about the digital human trafficking uh, webinar that we will be doing later this spring and join us again here for more fascinating conversations about the intersection of sexuality and technology. Have a great week. Comments are closed.
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