Sweet Revenge for Victim of online Love Scam

This is the news listed in The Star on 04 September 2011. The topic of the news is ‘Sweet revenge for victim of online love scam’ .It was talking about a woman who lived in Kuala Lumpur was cheated of her love and RM50,000 by her Internet ‘boyfriend’ 5 years ago. The woman is a 32 years old self-employed woman and she had fallen in love with the man in 2006.The man described himself as an Indian rational residing in Australia. He asserted that he is a rich man and told the woman that he wanted to visit her in Malaysia to give her a large amount of money. However, the suspect then lied that the Australian Customs had seized his cash because he had not declared the large sum of money. So he begged his Malaysian girlfriend to help him pay off the Customs officials. And the victim made four transactions to her “boyfriend” totalling RM50, 000 without suspecting him. Fast forward August 2011, the victim was surfing an internet chat site when she ‘met’ a man who tried to flatter her with the same pick-up lines and ‘story’. The suspect didn’t know that he was actually chatting with his ‘ex-girlfriend’. The victim then started to convince the suspect that she loved him and asked him to meet her in Malaysia. When the suspect agreed, she notified the police and lodged a police report to set up the ambush the next day. The 39-years-old Indian national with Australian Permanent Residence was then arrested when he reached KLIA on Sunday.

Technology is an ever more widespread facet of our everyday lives. Not only are more and more people starting to use computers, existing users are doing more and more computer related activities. Thus, there is always a very large pool of potential victims for the criminals to target.

In My Opinion, Most scam victims are naive, not stupid. You can never be free from risks when you help people that you have never met in person, but you can significantly reduce them if you are especially thorough and careful.