Matchmaker seeing rise in dating scams
Eithne Buckley, who is the owner and manager of twoheartsdating.com Matchmaking Agency has said she has had 3 new members join up recently who all had negative experiences on 3 different dating sites. The thing they had in common was they were asked for money from people they were chatting with online.
She believes people may be trying to find ways to get money coming up to Christmas and are befriending people on dating websites, posing as possible matches, building up a rapport over a few weeks or longer, and then when they feel they have the trust of the other person, they make up a story to elicit money.
One guy in his 50s, who had been chatting to a lady with a few weeks and was planning to meet her, said that she asked him to transfer money to her account as her child had suddenly been taken ill and was rushed to hospital. An operation was required for the child but she didn’t have health insurance and didn’t have the funds to pay for the operation.
As they had been chatting on FaceTime and knew what each other looked like, he trusted her and was about to transfer €2,000 to her, when he mentioned it to a friend who said it sounded like a scam. He told the lady that he didn’t have the money and never heard from her after that.
A woman in her 30s was also chatting to someone online and thought they were making a great connection and was looking forward to going on a date with him. Suddenly he said he couldn’t meet her as his car had broken down and would cost about €1,000 to repair it but he didn’t have it as he was paying a lot of maintenance to his ex-wife. She immediately got suspicious that he asked a stranger for money. She took her profile down.
The 3rd person was a guy in his 60s who was also looking forward to meeting a lady that he was chatting with for the last few months. The reason they hadn’t met before now he said, was that she was in the UK and very busy helping her daughter to look after her grandchildren. She asked him if he would send her the money for the flight and she would visit him at Christmas. She said she couldn’t afford the flight. He offered to buy the ticket for her but she wanted the money to be transferred. He got suspicious and didn’t contact her any more.
Eithne’s advice is to be very careful of these kind of scams as people who perform them are very sophisticated at what they’re doing. They often target people who may be feeling lonely or vulnerable and they reel them in with false promises of love and happiness with a new partner.
They use several phones and can also have multiple dating profiles and often use stolen photos.