Looking for friendship in the wrong places? Beware of new “friends” get rich schemes.
Online financial scams are easy to talk about but the scammers often hide them through personal contacts and promises of “friendship.”
They’ll rope you in with days of personal questions to get you emotionally involved while at the same time being evasive about themselves.
Online financial fraud is at record levels. “Friendship Scams” are among the most reported.
In most cases, you’ll never get a real telephone number and usually just a text number or repeated attempts to get you into an unmoderated and heavily encrypted chat room.
In the beginning, it will be a very friendly conversation. But after a while, it may turn to finances and hobbies…..and offers to share a common hobby together.
Once you firmly decline to “share a common interest” like “Binary Currency Exchange”, the relationship suddenly changes and promises of friendship cease. It’s like , “You’re not really serious about a relationship with me if you’re not interested in my hobbies”.
According to the FTC’s latest figures:
“In 2021, 5.7 million people filed reports and described losing more than $5.8 billion to fraud — a $2.4 billion jump in losses in one year. You can learn about the types of fraud, identity theft, and marketplace issues people reported by state, and how scammers took payment — including $750 million in cryptocurrency — in the FTC’s new Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book.
Here are some of the highlights:
More than 2.8 million people reported spotting fraud, and one in four said they also lost money. Their combined losses were over $5.8 billion. Imposter scams, when someone pretended to be a trusted person or business, led to losses of $2.3 billion.
Almost 600,000 people filed reports about credit bureaus in 2021, an increase of more than 80 percent over the previous year. This jump in reports made credit bureaus, information furnishers, and report users the #3 most-reported category of 2021, behind imposter scams (#2) and identity theft (#1).
People ages 20-29 reported losing money to fraud more often than people ages 80 and over. While younger people lost money 41 percent of the time they experienced fraud, older adults lost money only 17 percent of the time. But when older people did lose money, they lost a median amount of $1,500, or three times the median amount younger people lost.
Get rich schemes are well known. But in these days of isolation and global political upheaval and wars, it’s easy to look for “friendship” online.
It’s also becoming too easy to fall prey to their clouded offers of sharing “inside tips” and getting caught in a tangled web of financial fraud.
Here’s a recent SEC advisory and more info:
https://www.sec.gov/files/ia_binary.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_option
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-avoid-scam
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