From Russia With Love Scam Foiled

from the moving-on-from-419-scams... dept

There is, it appears, an infinite supply of suckers out there, willing to fall for just about any online scam. I keep thinking that the various 419 Nigerian money laundering scams have to die out sooner or later, after everyone has received their thousanth-or-so version of it via email. However, I'm sure it will only lead to new, similar scams. For example, if you can't trick people out of their money by appealing to their greedy side, why not appeal to their need to be loved? A student in Cameroon is now under arrest for running a scam where he pretended to be a beautiful Russian woman looking for a husband online. He apparently convinced several men to send him money in order to process his/her visa to come marry them. I've already heard of a similar scam that's making its way over email of a girl from eastern Europe who just "needs a place to stay" on her trip to the US after winning a "modeling" contest. The way the scam works (just like the Nigerian email scams) is that after the guy agrees to let the girl stay with him suddenly money problems come up, and she needs to borrow this or that to handle paperwork, or to get her flight organized, or some such thing. It's honestly quite amazing that people fall for these things, but they just keep on coming.

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