Meeting someone and expecting that to blossom into something real isn't unheard of these days. Platforms like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, etc have millions of users, all looking to find a romantic partner. Facebook too has a dating feature that is used widely across the globe. However, people often tend to forget that at the end of the day, the people that they meet on a social platform, especially dating apps, can't be trusted that easily, since they are strangers who have their identity guarded. You can never judge a person just on the basis of their social media handles and you surely should not trust them. There have been ample cases in the past wherein people were scammed by their online dates. And yet another incident took place recently.
According to a report, a woman hailing from Massachusetts, USA, lost all of her life savings when she trusted a man she met online. The woman had developed a romantic relationship of sorts with a man she met on Facebook in October last year. To keep her identity hidden, the woman is referred to as Alice.
She began talking to her Facebook boyfriend and thought that he was a 'hardworking family man who was widowed and looking for a meaningful connection'. In an interview, Alice told that the man seemed to be 'honest and sincere' and had never behaved inappropriately.
"No direct questions or anything like that that would lead me to make me suspicious as to who he was," she said and added, "Talking on the phone and texting, you get very close to people, and you really think, 'This is going to happen.'"
The duo even talked on video call a few times which made the woman trust him more.
However, in April this year, the man started asking Alice to send him money for different reasons. She kept transferring him money whenever he asked and only realised that she had been scammed when the man was supposed to come to see her in the US, but told her that he had been in a car accident and was hospitalised.
"I knew at that point I was being scammed," Alice told the publication and added, "I kind of thought that I wish I had the last two weeks back and wouldn’t have been so vulnerable in my life."
A similar case of being scammed by an online dating match was reported in India in May this year. A 37-year-old woman, working for a private firm in Bengaluru, accused her Tinder match of duping her of Rs 4.5 lakh. The scammer made the woman fall in love with him and had told her that he is living in UK and is coming to India to meet her. However, it was all a ruse and the woman was tricked by the scammer into depositing the money. The woman then approached the police in hopes of recovering her money.
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