Dear Ladies,

I know its Valentines Day and you feel lonely and unloved.

On the Internet there is a growing problem of romance scams. Divorced Christian women are vulnerable. It is happening all too often and I felt as the Mom to my divorced Christian women, I would try and get the message out there and what better day to do this, but Valentines Day.

I have just started to research all of this. So the following, is a entry on another blog made Jan 3. 2008. Please if any of you are involved in something like this, DON'T KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. Google: romance scams. There are message boards and websites and places to get help. There is a way out.

Incidences of romance or dating scams have been on the rise since they came to public knowledge a few years ago .Yet,many people in the Western world are yet to grasp the reality of the fact that romance scams seems to be on the increase.

Perhaps, because most of the people who lose money to these dating scams do not talk about their losses.Many people prefer to bear the financial losses in silence, rather than disclose them to any other party.
On the other hand, in Nigeria and other places where the scammers operate from, large amounts of dollars are being received on a daily basis from the scams.

In the third week of March 2006,for instance, a 20 year old young man,just seeking admission into the university, scammed 5000 British Pounds from a middle aged woman in the United Kingdom.

He is not the only one collecting such amounts from dating or romance scams.Daily,in thousands of cafes all over Nigeria,especially the SouthWestern part,and other West African countries,tens of thousands of young people are actively working at the romance scams and other internet scams,looking for such victims.

But then, the question arises –whom do the scammers target for their activities? Do they just pick on anyone anywhere, or do they have a particular set of people that they focus on to defraud them of their money?

From what I could gather in my research, here are the main types of people that the scams are focused on :

1. Elderly people and other lonely groups: Elderly women and men looking for companionship are believed to be especially vulnerable to the romance scams.They are believed to be soft at heart,and

willing to part with their money in return for romantic affection and attention. Other lonely groups of people are also a prime target. Their loneliness makes them to be in need of some form of company,which may not be readily available around them in their immediate environment and which the scammers readily provide.

2.Separated women,recently divorced women and the like are easy targets of the scammers. The trauma of their divorce or separation makes them vulnerable to internet love scams. The scammers hunt on various dating sites for women like these,often sifting through thousands of profiles in the process.

3.Overweight people:these set of people are about the easiest to target and to scam,according to the scammers. It appears some overweight people need someone to admire them and to love them the way they are. And it also appears that a number of them are insecure emotionally.Maybe as a result of this, some overweight women seem to do anything to hold on to a man,even if they do not know if he is for real. It appears that it is their sense of insecurity and their need for acceptance that is often exploited to get money of them.

4.People Looking For Sex: Many adult websites are a special target of the scammers.The scammers show nude pictures of themselves and pretend to engage in sexual acts with the persons they meet on the site. Usually,the people scammed through adult sites never disclose that they were scammed or they keep their losses to themselves. All who lost money to scams through this means declined to give figures of how much they were scammed of when interviewed.

People living with AIDS, and differently-abled people are also a target of the scams.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of those being targetted by the romance scams.These ones just happen to be the most popular ones that the scammers target.

The best way to deal with the dating or romance scams is to know how the scammers operate and be wise as to their ways. Educating yourself about these scams helps you to know how to prevent a romance scam from happening to you.