A Singaporean woman is blaming herself after she lost roughly $5,000 in three weeks when she became the victim of a scammer on Facebook's dating service.
The woman, identified as 27-year-old Malaysian Ms Ong, thought that love was blossoming for her after encountering a man online. She works as an administrative officer in Singapore and noted that she was approached by the suspect on Facebook Dating in February.
Singaporean Woman Scammed on Facebook Dating
The man claimed to be a group manager at e-commerce and gaming firm Sea Limited and added Ong as a Facebook friend. He then started to message the victim regularly over the course of three weeks.
In a statement, Ong said that from time to time, the man would talk about an investment program and later said that she was lucky enough to receive an invitation to invest. The program was supposedly an exclusive scheme that was only open to people with invitation codes, as per the Straits Times.
The suspect sent Ong a link to a website that had options to invest in projects such as Build-To-Order flats, non-fungible tokens, and cryptocurrency. The victim said that she decided to invest $2,100 for the first time in March and received $315 in profits after about an hour. She said that she was also promised high returns for her investments.
After Ong thought that the scheme was legitimate, she invested another $5,000 but was later told that she had to invest additional funds in a "special project" that the company was running before she could get her money back.
The victim said that the suspect urged her to borrow from friends and family and said that if she could not raise enough money within a certain amount of time, she would have to pay a penalty fee. That was when Ong realized that she had become the victim of a scam and made a police report and immediately froze her bank account.
Scammers in the online world are continuously growing and expanding their schemes to include ones that look legitimate. Writer-film producer Gini Graham Scott thought that she knew how to be cautious against such scams but was ultimately unable to avoid being victimized, according to Expert Click.
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Online Scams
She ended up losing her Facebook account and two big groups that she created on the social media platform. These were "Scammed" which featured different scams in the news and "The AI Revolution and Writers and Artists" which featured the latest developments in AI affecting writers and artists.
The scam involved a criminal who added their own email to the group and then proceeded to take over them. If the original owner does not act quickly enough or does not provide the right information, they lose all control over the groups.
On the other hand, a Metro Detroit man lost nearly $5,000 to scammers on Facebook Marketplace who were selling a boat motor. The victim, Mitchell GaskaIntro, was looking for a specific boat motor and found it on Facebook Marketplace, and it was on sale for almost $5,000.
After sending the money through PayPal and asking about the shipping timeline, the seller said that there was an unexpected $3,000+ insurance fee. When the scammer was being contacted, the number had already been disconnected, said Click on Detroit.
