Romance scamming: A global industry
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2022
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many of us will have noticed 'friend' or 'follow' requests on our social media from strangers with profiles which don’t quite ring true. They mainly use cloned pictures, often taken from accounts of those in the US military. Zoe Kleinman investigates the global industry of romance scamming, which can have tragic consequences. Zoe hears from Lisa Forte, a cyber security expert from Red Goat Security, Professor Alan Woodward from Surrey University, and she goes into the tragic story of Renee Holland, as investigated by Jack Nicas of the New York Times. With thanks to the New York Times for their material.
This is a repeat of a programme first broadcast on 26 August 2020
Producer: Sarah Treanor.
(Photo: Mobile phone display. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Business Daily on the BBC World Service with me, Zoe Kleinman. In today's program, |
| 0:07.0 | the fake but charming military men who are after your money, we look at one of the oldest and most |
| 0:12.5 | successful romance scams. Renee Holland thought she'd made an exciting new friend. She went to the airport |
| 0:19.4 | to pick him up one day, and she was draped in an |
| 0:22.3 | American flag. She had Welcome Home written on the windows of her car. And when she got there, |
| 0:27.3 | she realized that she had been scammed. No one was going to arrive. But for the men behind the |
| 0:31.7 | scam, it's just a numbers game. In my message thousands, only few will respond. Five may comply. |
| 0:38.6 | Out of the five, three may not have money. |
| 0:41.4 | Two we have. |
| 0:42.3 | Out of two, one may not be able to send money. |
| 0:45.1 | Okay. |
| 0:45.4 | But one will surely send. |
| 0:46.8 | That's all on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:53.7 | We've both had a few of these things lately, haven't we? Here, I've got one. I'm here in search for a companion and who will take care of me. |
| 1:01.9 | Had loads more at the beginning of the pandemic. Yes, it was a deluge, wasn't there? |
| 1:06.7 | Absolutely. Almost always in a US military uniform, very little information or just a message request, which I then deleted, obviously, but they kept coming. |
| 1:18.7 | That's producer Sarah and I talking about the never-ending fake friend requests on our social media. |
| 1:24.0 | And that's because when it comes to friend requests, things are not always, as they seem. |
| 1:28.4 | It's always quite blatantly. I'm looking for love. I'm looking for a relationship. |
| 1:33.3 | It's not very subtle. And I suppose that's the point. |
| 1:37.0 | Yeah, maybe. I mean, they do look extremely fake. And so sitting here talking to you, |
| 1:42.4 | it does seem quite hard to believe that anybody would fall for it, but they do. |
... |
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