Usually, after connecting via email or Google Hangouts or whatever, they try to maintain that they’re US citizens. Oliver offers to share his real story with me. Catfish Me: Part IV, The Ted Perrin Test If English Is a Second Language. Instead he smells a new opportunity to make money. When I confess to Oliver that I am a journalist working on a story about catfishers, it doesn’t faze him. If you do the simple math, that means romance fraud is a criminal enterprise that reaps $2 billion a year in Canada from its victims. But, because of shame, fewer than one per cent ever report the crime. By the time the victims wise up they are reeling from a double whammy of loss: one financial, the other emotional.Īccording to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, romance scams are the number one type of fraud in Canada, accounting for about $20 million in reported losses every year. Our investigation reveals that once money is sent, more sophisticated fraudsters are brought into the scam, followed by ever increasing demands for more money. They target dating websites, Facebook groups, instagram profiles.Īnyone who responds gets bombarded with loving messages and then some sort of a crisis that requires a small amount of money. They are a sophisticated crime syndicate that specializes in romance fraud. It has become so widespread that the American military has issued a directive that soldiers make their social media accounts private, in an attempt to thwart scammers who steal their pictures to create fake online personas.Ī W5 investigation ( The Invisible Man) uncovered an organization called The Black Axe which has chapters in 26 countries around the world, including Canada. soldiers trying to strike up conversations. In the course of researching this phenomenon, many women around me, colleagues and friends, have also been approached on Instagram by good looking, uniform wearing U.S. “Catfish” is a word that didn’t even exist a decade ago, but is a term used to describe a person who creates a fake social media profile, with someone else’s pictures, to lure unsuspecting victims into handing over their hearts, and then their wallets. Hurt that I was ignoring him, and realizing that he wasn’t going to get any money out of me, my scammer was accusing me of being a fraud for leading him on. You have been playing me all this while You’re a cat fish" Maka still go Dey bomb Na ogor go finish you there" A W5 investigation into romance scams airs Saturday at 7pm on CTV. To do this, simply go to Google Images and click on the little camera icon to upload a picture or paste a picture’s URL and start your search. Na guy man you Dey follow dey waist him time since You no go just talk say you be work man. You can simply use Google reverse image search to find similar pictures like the one used by your (potential) catfisher and find out where they come from.
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