HOUSTON - With hundreds of social networking sites online, the Internet has become a virtual dating scene where singles meet and fall in love.But your Mr. Right may be looking for more than romance. He may only be interested in your money.
Investigative reporter Amy Davis discovered a Web site growing in popularity that can help you distinguish a true Casanova from a con artist.
"A couple of friends told me about the sites that they had been doing and that they were having fun, and I was thinking, 'Well, why not?'" said a woman who did not want to be identified.
She told Local 2 that she did nothing wrong. Her only crime was being too trusting.
She met a man on a singles dating site who sent her pictures, supposedly of himself. After weeks of exchanging e-mails and even phone calls from London, the man then mailed her money orders and asked her to wire him the cash.
"When I saw that, I was like, 'Oh, my goodness. These are bogus. This is a scam,'" she said.
And it is not a new scam, according to the federal law enforcement agencies. The FBI has warned of romance fraud online, and now other private groups are warning trusting people, too.
Romancescams.org encourages people to post pictures of others who supposedly scammed them.
We found an identical picture of the one e-mailed to the woman in our story. It turns out that the man in the picture is not her love interest.
There are hundreds of pictures of people who are actually victims themselves.
Here's how it works - the pictures were nabbed off the Internet by scammers who claim the pictures are of them.
Since they have no intention of ever meeting face to face, you may as well be talking to Bozo the Clown.
Romancescams.org has also posted a quiz on its site with questions such as "Have you been on a social or dating networking site within the past six months?"
"Does the person you met claim to be from the U.S., but is working overseas?"
If you answer yes to a majority of the questions, it's likely that you are involved in a romance scam.
You'll also find links for how to report these scams to the appropriate law enforcement agency.
For more information, visit romancescams.org.
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