This is way outside of what I normally comment on in my site, but I thought it was worth pointing out to you all to show it can happen to anyone. Fortunately nobody was caught out in this scam, but it serves as an example of why trust needs to be developed when doing things online.
Firstly, the person seeking the services of the “Dating site” was not me, but a lady I know who asked my advice when she became suspicious.
Details are deliberately obscured here to save embarrassment, but hopefully you will get the general idea of how this scam works.
The person seeking the services of a dating agency signed up to one of the leading providers. A service you pay for. Located someone and wished to learn more about them and started a conversation. The potential partner was male, allegedly aged between 45 and 65. A very successful businessman living in rented accommodation in London and travelling extensively in a high profile business role. He was “so successful that he could afford to retire”, and both parties hit it off from day one. Or so it seemed.
The “international business man” indicated that he was really happy and immediately cancelled his membership of the dating agency (apparently this is typical behaviour for people running scams). He indicated that he had found his “perfect” partner. Conversations were over the phone or by email, no face to face meeting had occurred. The potential partner was “gushing” with his approval of the match. It all was beginning to look a little too good to be true.
He indicated that he needed to travel to South Africa on business and would be gone for a few days. He left the country to travel to South Africa.
He got back in contact to say there had been a problem with his bank cards and could he borrow some money to pay the staff working for him in a dockyard in Pretoria.
Fortunately the potential lender in this case knew that Pretoria is actually 200kms inland, just north of Johannesburg, and has no port. So this was warning number 2. No money was loaned, and the businessman became quite aggressive asking for money.
We read about these things all of the time, a less switched on person may have started loaning money to someone like this under these circumstances. I recommended that the dating agency that was being used was contacted and the information should be shared with them in case the individual was preying on other people.
I asked if the person had provided a photograph, they had; two. I know that if you do a particular type of search on Google you can search for images that are similar to a target image. I suggested that the photograph had probably been lifted from the Internet by someone to hide their true identity, so they were masquerading as someone else. That turned out to be exactly the case!
Here is the alleged image of the person that was claiming to be a successful international businessman in the shipping industry and signed up to a dating agency. A search using Google Image search found lots of images matching this one.
I was told the man in question had a “strange accent” partly Scandinavian, and his name was Christian Hansen. (turns out to be a quite common name, so less likely to be found). The person was also using a Gmail account, so you could not locate anything about the person that way either.
Further research came back with a YouTube video of the man in the image. Who by the way is totally innocent in all of this, someone had copied his image from the internet and used it on the dating site to deliberately mask their true identity. As I suspected, when you hear him talking there is no accent, and his name is actually Steve Bustin a successful Media & Communications Expert. My friend also confirmed that Steve Bustin is not the person she had been talking to over the phone.
Fortunately in this case no money changed hands, and the dating agency is doing their own investigation into this. As for Steve Bustin, he has no idea someone has been using his photograph for fraudulent purposes. Worse still it is highly unlikely that anyone will be able to trace the person at the end of the gmail address. He will no doubt be running several scams like this under different aliases.
The Google Image search offers a way of running your own analysis. You can try it yourself here: https://images.google.com/ find an image of yourself and do a search on it, you may be surprised what comes back.