{"id":101324,"date":"2020-06-23T07:17:56","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T11:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=101324"},"modified":"2022-01-23T22:42:56","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T03:42:56","slug":"i-love-you-send-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=101324","title":{"rendered":"I Love You – Send Money"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although it was last month, the Virginia Pilot-Online published an excellent article<\/a> about online dating scams involving unsuspecting members of the military.<\/p>\n

\n

No, this Virginia Beach sailor doesn\u2019t want your love or money. It\u2019s a scam, and he\u2019s a victim too<\/a><\/h4>\n
\n
\n

VIRGINIA BEACH \u2014 Up to 10 times a day, Mike Sency\u2019s phone pings with a message from someone angry he stole their money or abandoned their online romance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

\u201cHow dare you to ever tell me you love me,\u201d read one recent Facebook message he received, explaining his actions had made the sender feel \u201ccompletely empty inside.\u201d<\/p>\n

“I can\u2019t believe your (sic) going to play dumb.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Sency, a petty officer 1st class stationed in Virginia Beach, has never met or even communicated with any of these people before.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

then…<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

It works like this: a scammer takes photos of someone like Sency, creates a fake social media account and develops a new online persona \u2014 sometimes using the real name of the person in the photo. Then the scammer will strike up online conversations with women around the world, many of them older or vulnerable, and pretend to be in a hard spot.<\/p>\n

“They like to use this sob story of, ‘I\u2019m deployed to some austere land and my wife and kid have left me … My unit left me and I\u2019m stuck in this country. I need money for the flight home,\u2019 ” Sency said. \u201cWhich makes no sense if you know anything about the military.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scammers often continue these digital romances over long stretches of time, gaining the victim\u2019s trust and prying out more money. Sometimes they solicit risque photographs and use them as blackmail.<\/p>\n

Such online scams are known as \u201ccatfishing,\u201d and can be used for financial gain or abuse, among other things.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Army\u2019s Criminal Investigation Command receives hundreds of reports a month from victims who have been tricked by people impersonating a soldier online, according to its website.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

We can attest to the uptick in these scams.<\/p>\n

It is common to snag photos of real active-duty military, then either pick a common name such as Johnson, Rodriguez, or Smith, blur out the nametag or make the photo unreadable, and pass the photos off as someone looking for love.<\/p>\n

This is probably what he actually looks like…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They don’t usually say they are Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, or Marine Recon – just simply a regular guy trying to do his part in the military.<\/p>\n

The only deviation we have found from the above article is that it is common to say they are a widower with a 9-12 y\/o child, versus a divorcee.\u00a0 I’m guessing being a widower says “through no fault of my own I am without a significant other.”<\/p>\n

They say they are in Iran, Yemen or some odd place and eventually want money to come home to visit their child and\/or swing by to visit the person sending the money.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I could be wrong, but I have a vivid picture of a weekly seminar being taught in a warehouse in Somalia on how to do this – since it is all remarkedly similar.\u00a0 It is probably titled “So You Want to be a Scammer?”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although it was last month, the Virginia Pilot-Online published an excellent article about online dating scams … I Love You – Send Money<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":663,"featured_media":101338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,391],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-phony-soldiers","category-valorvultures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/663"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101337,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101324\/revisions\/101337"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/101338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}