Hello, welcome to the Wednesday, June 17th, 2020 edition of the Sandtonet Storm Center's

Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich. And today I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Today we got an interesting story from Xavier about something that's really a layer 8 problem

dealing with people and not with technology.

And well, as they know on the internet, nobody really knows that you're actually a dog or a cat,

so it's pretty easy to pretend to be someone else. And we came across a Russian or actually Ukrainian, I believe, forum that does

sort of just follow that motto with dating sites. This forum consists of individuals who

register with dating sites using female names and photos, and then they're waiting for married

men to have a date with them, at least online, so nothing actually happens in real life.

And once they have enough information about these individuals, they're posting it to the

forum in order to extort money from their victims.

Now the theme of this forum is very much that they essentially are sort of uncovering unfaithful husbands, but in the end it ends up

coming down to money.

They will ask for money to have any posts removed from the forum.

Now even if someone pays and the post is removed, this isn't really all that terribly effective,

given that Google will of course cache these pages and the information can often still be found.

This forum has been operational for a couple of years and is still very active with several

posts daily and a few thousand posts overall.

So a lesson here, well, be careful who you trust online.

And yes, with dating sites and such, you never really know who is on the other side.

And actually, many prior studies and so have shown

that the majority of these profiles is often fake.

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