My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
1 min read
Summary
Ben Tasker decided to analyse a scam email campaign that turned out to be a ‘romance scam’.
He contacted the scammers and set up a few traps for them, including a custom domain and website that logged any visitors, namely the scammers.
The breakthrough in finding out the location of the scammers came when they forgot to switch on their VPN and the email headers pointed to an IP address from a Russian ISP.
This investigation showed that scammers create sob stories and use photoshopped images and visas to convince their ‘marks’ (who are often taken in by the stories) to send them money.
This is why education is vital to warn people of the hazards of the internet.
Also, it is relatively easy to create much more sophisticated and realistic scams using LLMs and diffusion models.
