“I am your perfect online partner" analysis of dating profiles used in cybercrime
- Authors: Kopp, Christian , Sillitoe, James , Gondal, Iqbal
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Asia Pacific Journal of Advanced Business and Social Studies Vol. 3, no. 2 (2017), p. 207-217
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- Description: Internet Online Dating has become an influential mainstream social practice facilitating the finding of a partner. Unscrupulous operators have identified its potential and started to use this platform for identity theft in form of so called Online Romance Scams. Quickly, this cybercrime has become very successful and thus, an increasing threat in the social networking environment. So far, very little is known about its structure and the reason for its success, and this needs to be known in order to be able to fight it efficiently. This research tries to contribute to this knowledge, and argues that scammers use so-called ‘Love Stories’, which represent personal affinities related to romantic relationships, to their benefit when tailoring common narratives as part of fraudulent online profiles to attract their victims. We look at these different types of ‘Personal Love Stories’ and discuss how they can be used in this type of scam, followed by a qualitative analysis of fraudulent profiles from three different international websites to examine this assumption
Online romance scam: Expensive e-living for romantic happiness
- Authors: Kopp, Christian , Sillitoe, James , Gondal, Iqbal , Layton, Robert
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings
- Relation: Proceedings of the 29th Bled eConference: Digital Economy (BLED 2016), Slovenia, pp.175-189 p. 15
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- Description: The Online Romance Scam is a very successful scam which causes considerable financial and emotional damage to its victims. It is based on building a relationship which establishes a deep trust that causes victims to voluntarily transfer funds to the scammer. The aim of this research is to explore online dating scams as a type of e-Living which initially creates happiness for the victim in a virtual romantic relationship, but tragically then causes the victim to be separated from his or her savings. Using narrative research methodology, this research will establish a model of the romance scam structure and its variations regarding human romantic attitudes, and will develop a theory which explains how the victim is moved through the phases of the scam. Findings of this research will contribute to the knowledge of the Online Romance Scam as e-Crime and provide information about the structure and the development of the modus operandi which can be used to identify an online relationship as a scam at an early phase in order to prevent significant harm to the victim.