SingleGuyInNC asks,
My question is since this wasn’t during free communication weekend, they must have been a paid subscriber. If so, how did they they pay for the service and why wasn’t their basic information checked during the credit card billing process and found that they were either using a stolen credit card number or had mismatched addresses? They should be flagging suspicious accounts sooner to protect the interests of the rest of their legitimate users.
Dear SingleGuyInNC:
Romance scams have more to it than stolen credit card numbers. It is actually an industry of its own. If you get to meet an online dating industry professional (I’m not one!), ask them about Ghana. Mark Brooks writes,
It’s easy to write off scammer victims as being a screw loose. I mean, who would be dumb enough to part with thousands of dollars with someone they had never met? But, it’s happening every day, and chances are it’s happening on [any dating site].
Recently, in the news,
- “The U.S. embassy in Accra, Ghana, reports receiving up to 15 calls a week from Americans who have lost money on relationship scams originating in Ghana” –Seacoast Online, 5 November 2006
- Romance scam investigation results in the arrest of two subjects in Accra, Ghana — RCMP Press Release, Alberta, 18 May 2007
- “‘He said he won a contract in Ghana, but when he got back, he’d like to meet me,’ Giocolo said.” –CNN, 21 April 2008
- The Ghanaian Internet Dating started with the concept of whites or singles living abroad seeking Ghanaians and that has been the trend until now. Internal online dating is very minimal. –founder of GhanaSinglesNet.com
Ghanaians and Nigerians in eHarmony
Here’s a shock: According to Quantcast, most eHarmony site visitors come from Ghana, next to Canada and the US.
This is not saying there are 30,000 Ghanaians in eHarmony; the real numbers are higher. First, they have multiple accounts. Second, they use proxy servers located on the USA so their visits count as US visits.
What is eHarmony doing about this?
The company set up the email address matchconcerns@eharmony.com from the beginning to receive reports. eHarmony is notorious for being aggressive in removing wayward members from the service.
eHarmony has never published any study, report, announcement or recommendation on romance scams happening within their site. Not even in their eHarmony Advice publication. Perhaps a “Is your match a scammer” tipsheet will undermine their reputation.
Does eHarmony have safeguards in place for fraudulent visits? Last night I tried to visit the site and sign in from a West African IP address. I got through. The Quantcast table confirms this. I confirmed a while ago that I can create a Canadian profile in eHarmony US or eHarmony Australia. I know I can pay eHarmony with a credit card that is based overseas (i.e., whose country doesn’t match the registrant’s country). So, are there safeguards? I don’t know.
Stolen credit cards, stolen identities and RelyID
How about locking customers to their credit card’s country? Well, how would you like being told you can’t use eHarmony when you need to work in India for a couple of months? On the other hand, how about the subscriber in Ghana who changed his country to USA a day after he registered?
What merchant wants chargebacks? No one does. eHarmony, being a service provided on ethernet and not a tangible item, perhaps cannot refuse transactions on credit cards based overseas. Perhaps they absorb the eventual chargeback fee ($25-$30) as a cost of doing business.
And, yes, identities can be stolen. All RelyID does is give a safeguard that the person using eHarmony under the profile of “Jan Thomas (Anytown, USA)”, knows enough about a certain Jan Thomas of Anytown, USA, that exists on public records. Judging from a RelyID explanatory email, that person may really be using a stolen credit card or may really be typing away in Ghana or Nigeria.
There’s money to be made in romance scams. I heard from an anonymous source that the first paying customers of a brand-new online dating site will be scammers. Chargebacks will be frequent, this source said. Don’t think though that these sites ignore such users because they increase traffic and persuade people to join.
Gotten smarter and more organized
The CNN article shows how limited what online dating sites can do.
- Ruses go for months and beyond the dating site.
- Marks are added to a ‘gullible list’, just as people who buy once from a phone telemarketer get more phone calls.
- Initial communications are based on boilerplate templates that are continually honed and critiqued for effectiveness. Surely, the seduction community helped.
The rouge you encountered, SingleGuyInNC, was foolish and amateurish for putting ‘on contract’ and ‘in Nigeria’ on eHarmony’s internal messaging. Others are smarter than that.
Next Installment
Next time I will talk about (1) How one can tell scammers and (2) How to use a scammer database. In the meantime, I would like to know how rampant they are. Do they target small towns or large cities? What do you think?
Read “Ghana and Nigeria: Top 10 clues to spot them and Top 3 habits to repel them” next
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