Opinion

Internet dating breaks hearts and drains bank accounts

  23 July 2009 4:00am
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When one talks about internet dating it sounds like something which is not real and could not provide single people with lovers.Recently, it became known in Ghana that many young guys were posing as young girls who were looking for partners from developed countries and managed to dupe their victims of several hundreds of dollars after they have succeeded to convince them that they were ready to marry them. The would-be partners or husbands after sending the money to their love birds in Ghana never hear from them again as these fraudsters change their bank accounts and address as well as their phone numbers to make investigations difficult. However when one comes to North America or for that matter Canada especially, internet dating is real and every where people search for their real love partners every day where there have been true success stories shared by many who were hooked up with their lovers through the internet. Others also have their hearts broken or their woes of finding a real true lover worsened as persons who posed as true lovers find out to be tricksters, fraudsters and whatever.Not long ago, a divorced woman in Edmonton who did not want to be identified met a gorgeous young man on the internet dating site not suspecting that he was capable of breaking her heart and draining her bank account. The victim of this internet dating join a list of vulnerable women duped of almost 300,000 CAN DOLLARS in the past few months by fraudsters strolling popular dating websites.Investigations revealed that they do not tell their would-be victims bad stories rather good stories about themselves which everyone wants to hear. The fraudster who duped the woman claimed to be a wealthy American business man, dealing in antiques in Nigeria. This victim ended up sending him thousands of Canadian dollars after he claimed his son was in a terrible car accident, underwent three surgeries and eventually died. According to the victim, whilst at the first time she refused to give him money, his insistence and promises that they'd meet in person was enough to mask any possible foreshadowing. Although police have received a number of complaints there is little hope of catching the crooks or recovering any cash. The Emergency Police Service [EPS] economic crimes Det. Mark Johnson said, "they know how to cover their tracks" adding it is certain the woman's money was collected in Nigeria. This is one out of several incidents that has happened over the years as far as internet dating and fraudulent activities keep growing day after day, making everyone a possible victim. What has become common these days is that the fraudsters use a system to determine persons who often use the internet facility to transact business and dump an interesting mail in your email box. Here in Canada, it is called junk mails where some reads, "your email address has won a CAN DOLLARS 500,000 please send us your full name, age, occupation, telephone number and passport number for us to process your claims." Others try to call your home phone to convince you that you have won a special lottery with your phone number and should follow the same process as mentioned above for claims or there is going to be a dinner somewhere therefore inviting you to come and dine only for you to go and get stripped of your phones, money and other valuable items. Because I use the internet facility more often than not to follow news from Ghana and other places especially watching Black Stars matches live, Obama visit, read daily news items from CNN, BBC and Joy Online as well as other media stations, I receive as much as ten of these letters daily only for me to delete them. Here I will like to warn most of our young boys and girls as well as the aged that there are hi-tech internet fraudsters out there plotting to dupe you big therefore watch out.Credit: Stephen A.Quaye-Toronto-Canada. teemagi2003@yahoo.com

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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.

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