Fraudster seeks SWF with loaded bank account willing to be duped
“Will your mystery date be a dream…or a dud?” That was a line I remember from a commercial for a board game called Mystery Date that was popular in the late sixties. I remember my sister playing the game with her friends, each trying to assemble the perfect matching outfit for a shot at a “dream date.” Forty years ago game maker Milton Bradley’s idea of a dream date was bowling, skiing, beach or a formal dance. Now with online dating the norm, a dream date would mean your mystery date isn’t a fraud trying to fool you into sending them money.
Trust is the bedrock on which online dating services are built. If members start to feel unsafe in the dating pool then they’ll opt out or try a different service. Online dating services understand this dynamic and some go to great lengths to try and keep the criminal element out. These are often sophisticated criminals working from offshore. CTO and co-founder of Date.com Chris Covino told Inc. Magazine that they “found many crime rings employed multiple teams that focused on different parts of a fraud operation.” He goes on to say “one team located in the U.S. would register free user accounts, but when it came time to input stolen credit card numbers to create fake pay accounts — which is illegal here — that was done from offshore. Another threat to online dating members is attempts by criminals to use false profiles and email to carefully persuade members to send cash or check-taking advantage of anonymity and the promise of companionship.
Fraudsters typically conceal the true location of their computer using a hidden proxy in an attempt to appear as a legitimate member. By using a hidden proxy scammers can pretend to be in one location, frequently a US city, when the device they are actually using to execute a fraudulent transaction is located in another country all together. Sam Bates, co-founder and CTO at Chellaul implemented ThreatMetrixc Device Identification recently as a measure to identify scammers and keep them off their dating web sites. Before ThreatMetrix “scammers were coming back faster than we could kick them out because we had no way of tracking them.” Now they keep track of compromised devices so anyone attempting to log-in with one is immediately flagged. Sam says Chellaul has “moved from random guesswork to systematic identification of scammers and so far we’ve banned over 1,500 fraudulent members.” That helps Chellaul’s bottom line by offering a better customer experience that should lead to greater membership, renewals and higher customer satisfaction.
Is your online dating service using device identification to help ensure that your mystery date isn’t a “dud” trying to rip you off?
Flashback: Check out the 1960’s Mystery Date TV commercial on YouTube
- Tom
