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What Does Internet Dating Have To Do With Identity Theft?
Posted on Jul 29, 2007 by Michelle Pastor
MSNBC had an interesting Dateline show recently about catching ID thieves. The show created a fake online electronics store and advertised it as one that accepts stolen credit cards to pay for merchandise. Apparently such stores exist, so no one became suspicious.
When the news crew tracked the deliveries of the merchandise ordered with stolen credit cards, they found that the recipients were collecting the merchandise and shipping it to other countries such as India. When they talked with the recipients of the packages, they found a few common threads. Not only were all the recipients unknowing participants of identity theft, but they all happened to mention they were about to get married to men or women they met over the internet but had not yet met in person. In each case it was their mysterious fiance that instructed them to ship any merchandise they received to another country where they were waiting to resell it for huge profits.
All of the recipients of the merchandise were duped and no marriages resulted because it was just a front for credit card fraud. It’s a good warning, though, of how easy it is to trick someone over the internet.
There’s no way to know how much of this goes on, but it’s one more twist on identity theft.
Filed under: Fraud, Identity Theft, Scams
Tags: identitytheft, idtheft, internet
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