Leading anti-fraud company Scamalytics was featured on the most recent episode of the BBC docu-series ‘For Love or Money’.
The show investigates individual cases of romance fraud to try and find answers for the victims. It also aims to make the techniques used by scammers publicly known, to lower the number of incidents in the future.
The last episode, which aired on 8th November, involved a woman named Rachel who had doubts about a man she’d met on Match.com. The online dating website is currently being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission over claims that it deliberately promoted fake profiles to encourage users to sign up for premium subscriptions.
Rachel sent more than £30,000 to “Henrik Björn” after he told her he’d run into difficulty while on a business trip to Indonesia. However, after a reverse image search, the BBC found the pictures actually belonged to well-known businessman Jeffrey Hayzlett.
Co-founder of Scamalytics Dan Winchester was consulted on the research and used the firm’s database of blacklisted profiles to find Hayzlett’s photos, which were being used by 21 different scammers.
Scamalytics runs a shared database across numerous dating platforms to prevent identified fraudsters from utilising a new service.
In a statement to GDI, Winchester said: “The BBC asked us to investigate a scammer they were covering. We did a basic search across our network using the photos and aliases used by the scammer, and found activity across 11 different dating services, operated by five different operators, with activity dating from 2015 to the present day.”
“This was covered extensively on the show, and was a great opportunity to demonstrate the power of sharing scammer information between dating service operators.”
The BBC were able to put Rachel in contact with Hayzlett so she could talk about her experiences and have some closure.
Watch the full episode here.