![]() ![]() “I’ve had number of people report that they met their scammer on Words with Friends,” she told Yahoo News Australia. Particularly platforms that are not associated with dating and users are less suspicious. Ms Marshall said scammers are increasingly contacting people on any online platform that allows users to chat. Jan Marshall 'loaned' her scammer $260,000 in 2012, which she never saw again. “Often they will say I am the only person they have spoken to.” “I’ve had hundreds of people contact me from all around the world, both men and woman of all ages who have been scammed,” she told Yahoo News Australia. She has since set up an advocacy group for other victims called Life After Scams to help people deal with the shame of being duped in a romance scam. Making matters worse, she took money out of her self-managed super fund incurring a hefty tax bill, adding to her loses. After speaking to a man online for 72 days, and falling in love with him, she sent her scammer $260,000 which she never saw again. Ms Marshall was duped in a particularly ruinous online scam in 2012. Because by doing that they know they can have power over them,” says Victorian woman and scam victim Jan Marshall. “Perpetrators are deliberately targeting people to get them to fall in love. While Mr Buck knows what to look for, others aren’t so circumspect. When talking to them on Google Hangouts, inconsistencies in their story are a dead giveaway of their fraudulent nature, he says. Just from routinely playing the app, Mr Buck says he encounters about one scam artists a week. “These big companies aren’t doing anything about it,” he said. His efforts to report scam accounts to Zynga, the parent company of Word with Friends, and to Google often fall on deaf ears. Mr Buck strings along the scammers trying to get as much information out of them before reporting their account and exposing the tricks they use on his blog Against Scammers dedicated to warning people.īut getting them fully removed is all but impossible. Scammers will quickly try and move the conversation off platform and onto Google Hangouts. The first time it was their birthday, then their aunty was sick and now their phone is broken.” “I’ve got one scammer that I’m dealing with at the moment, they’ve tried to scam me three different ways for Amazon gift cards. ![]() I’ve had people on oil rigs in the Middle East, people who have had sick relatives,” Mr Buck explained. “They’ve got different scripts they run through. ![]() “All of a sudden I was getting these messages from people claiming to be Americans but from their grammar it was obvious they weren’t,” he told Yahoo News Australia.Īfter initiating conversation, the scammer typically asks if the person is single before insisting on moving the conversation to Google Hangouts where it’s less likely they will have their account shut down. He says the number of scammers operating on the app seemed to increase around September last year. It’s believed that many of the scammers are operating out of African nations such as Ghana and Nigeria and target people around the world.īritish man Craig Buck works in IT and is a frequent Words with Friends player. “No longer are dating websites the only contact method for dating and romance scams, with an increasing number of reports coming from these emerging websites and apps,” said the ACCC’s deputy chair Delia Rickard. A new trend emerging in 2019 involved scammers increasingly turning to apps like Google Hangouts, or online games such as Words with Friends and Scrabble to con their victims, the ACCC warned. ![]()
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