A young man in India has been scammed out of Rs1.25 lakh ($1,750) by people who claimed that they worked for a dating app.
The fraudsters contacted Sumit pretending to work for online classifieds network Locanto, and said that they wanted him to work on the dating side of the site.
He was told that every time he went on a date with a girl he would get paid Rs25,000 ($350). However, suspicions began to arise when the developers demanded that Sumit paid to register his account and got more aggressive as he struggled to pay the fee.
The victim told The Tribune: “After paying Rs1,600 ($22), I was asked to pay Rs20,000 more to get my registration number. At that time, I had Rs6,000. I deposited in the account number given to me. As I didn’t have more money, I didn’t follow it up.
“On June 25, a man called me, asking me to deposit more money in the account. He threatened to file a police complaint against me if I refused to play along. Scared, I deposited Rs1,24,780 in five bank accounts between June 27 and July 26.”
Local police were able to identify the owners of the five bank accounts and investigating officers are confident that they will be arrested soon.
At the start of 2019, a phishing scam was uncovered that redirected targets to a fake Ashley Madison homepage which potentially contained malware and inappropriate content.
12 months earlier, Chinese officials shutdown 21 dating companies and arrested more than 600 suspects after their platforms were found to contain a large number of fake female profiles.
Read more here.