Hello and welcome to the Wednesday, January 28th, 2006 edition of the Sands International

Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, recording today from Jacksonville, Florida.

And this episode is brought you by the sands.edu master's degree program in

information security engineering. Well, today's diary comes from one of our undergraded interns.

Farras Azari wrote about the initial stages of romance scams. You probably received some of these text messages yourself that

look like they were just misrouted, someone typing the wrong phone number, and looking

for an old friend. Well, this is just the start of it. The goal here is to retain the interest

of the victim, that's the recipient of this text message,

get them involved in a more elaborate conversation,

and of course, in the end, getting money out of them.

Now, what Faris found here is that there were likely multiple scammers

involved here impersonating the same individual. Also, the money in the

end was apparently being extracted via crypto coin scams. For us, of course, didn't follow up

on the actual crypto coin scam, but let it be at that stage. The scammer was, of course, no quite insistence after investing

some time into the conversation to actually get Ferris, then to take the next step, which

didn't happen here. A couple sort of comments on this. So first of all, these scams are very common.

Most people don't fall for them. But sadly, ever so often, someone does fall for these scams. And from what I have heard

from people who try to help victims is that it can sometimes be very difficult to convince the

victim that this is actually a scam.

So that's sort of an added problem here.

And I think it's probably also related with the victim not really wanting to admit that they fell for something that in hindsight was a very obvious scam.

The other thing that sort of made the news ever so often is that the scammers here, which, well, are essentially sort of call centers, aren't always scamming voluntarily, but that they're also victims of some sorts of human trafficking and such that are based on being forced to conduct these scams. So a very complex case and scam overall.

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