Shelley Polansky
Last month, Better Business Bureau issued an in-depth investigative study on romance scams. As detailed in the study, romance scammers typically contact their victims through dating websites, apps or social media, often using fake profiles and event stolen credit card information. Using these false identities, scammers may spend months grooming their victims, building what the victim believes to be a loving relationship, before asking for money to handle an emergency or travel expenses.
The financial damage inflicted by these scams, which is often accompanied by far greater emotional harm, is often just the tip of the iceberg. According to the BBB report, 20 to 30 percent of romance scam victims were used as “money mules” in 2018 alone, with these victims numbering in the thousands.
Money mules act as financial middlemen in a variety of scams, laundering money from other victims by receiving money or goods purchased with stolen credit cards and sending them on to the fraudsters, often out of the country. This often happens when the romance scam victim has no money or already has given all of their money to the scammer. The victim may be a willing accomplice or may have a variety of other motives – love, fear, financial compensation for their own losses – but the outcome is the same: By providing this type of aid to the fraudster instead, the victim aids and abets a variety of other frauds, muddying the scope of a fraud and the identity of the real perpetrator.
The scams which money mules may become embroiled include business email compromises, fake check scams, credit card reshipping, and grandparent scams. As law enforcement cracks down on romance and other frauds, prosecuting more of these scams’ perpetrators in recent years, money mules at times have been prosecuted as well, facing jail time and restitution payments. In most cases, however, there is no desire to take criminal action against unwitting participants who had no financial gain and who stop transferring money for crooks as soon as they realize the role they have been playing.
If you have a been a victim of a romance scam or suspect that you are, it’s important to report it right away. Contact the Federal Trade Commission at 877-FTC-HELP and your BBB at bbb.org/scamtracker.
~ Shelley Polansky, VP Communications, BBB Serving Northern Colorado and Wyoming.