avoid Romance scams online and especially on dating apps

let me start by introducing myself

Hello there!

I am Matthieu Richard, Founder and CEO at MRichard333.com (a website about Cybersecurity and fraud prevention), everything started with me exposing tech support scammers on my YouTube channel in the years 2017, I have exposed a few cyber-crimes and collected many scammers numbers and some fraudulent webistes that me and my community was posting on my Discord server, perhaps now today they are all shutdown.

Before it was easy for me to pull up a list of scammers numbers and website in a day, now it is near impossible, they have change tactics and most of them no longer operate with these technique, people’s can report to us cyber-crimes that they have experienced themself (here) and what I have noticed in the past years is an increase in the amounts of romance scams online, especially on dating apps and also due to the deep fake, an increase of persons successfully convincing others that they are a celebrity, example Keanu Reeve (which is my favorite actor by the way) and they ask money to there fan in order to meet them (which will never happen).

Let’s take a moment to also admire how generous Keanu Charles Reeves is and such an amazing actor! Recently someone tried to convince me that they where Keanu Reeve and they send me this picture to prove it which I have analyzed truly and find out it was altered but the thing is that he was also asking me for 700$ in amazon gift cards in order to meet him, which is ridiculous. It may seems evident for some people’s but never pay something in gift card, 99.99% of the times, it is a scam.

See the picture an identity impersonator send me:

BAck to romance scams

I have received multiple report of users concerning romance scams so I have try to find one and you will be surprised by where I meet her, on Facebook meeting dating app and she was the best scammer that I have ever saw, we have discussed for 3 months! she was a pro of manipulation and I was playing dumb with her.

For the records we even have videos chat and that was the girl in the picture, an Asian girl of about 30 years old pretending to live in my city, perharps I learn that she was living in Singapore with times, well she start on facebook but quickly invite me to WhatsApp where it is a lot harder to track the person and prove what she did.

She was the queen of manipulation let me tell you, she never have asked me to invest my money, she was only bragging about how much money she was making investing on a cheap crypto and the profits that she was imagining, she was telling me bunch of information to prove me that she know her stuff and would’t waste her hard earned money without thinking carefully.

She even promise to meet my parent and all, she was the nicest person until I discovers the hidden truth:

She had invited me initially to a legit Crypto Exchange to invest in Crypto (Binance - Fully registered with the government and legit) so I haven’t question her on that, then she ask me to transfer Bitcoins on the cheap crypto that she was talking about earlier but this was another website, actually a full other exchange service, ( Quark Exchange - A Fraudulent exchange not registered with the government).

And at this point I wasn’t sure, I transferred a bit of money just to test the website and being allowed in, yes I loose it all. But the fraud department told me that the worst they saw, was $1.4 Million in these type of scams so you can imagine the financial trouble that it can cause to someone.

Well, once allowed in and my account created, the first thing that I have done was checking the source code and bam in less then 5 minutes I spot some CSS animation and saw they where just copying the data from another legit website API that just provide the prices of the crypto but no exchange and I knew it was fraudulent.

At that moment I check the whois information and oh surprise surprise, they are hosted on Namecheap, the same Hosting company then MRichard333.com (us), so I have good relation with Namecheap and access to premium support 24/7, I show them all the proof against them and the transaction id's of the blockchain ( a lot of information that I have also send to the Canadian Anti Fraud Center, the police and to the FTC)

The same day there website was shutdown and I was happy!

See the screenshot that I had take of the fraudulent website (New one):

Then the girl message me again

Then the girl message me again on WhatsApp saying that her “Aunt” told her they where doing an update and that was why the website was down ( My Aunt is not tech savvy at all so I found that suspicious haha) That was probably the website developer or the brain of this that she was referring to as her “Aunt“.

Anyway, about 10 hours later, she send me a new link and that was the same website nothing had change except the domain and I was discouraged to see that they could do that so fast.

The funniest and unfunniest part in that is that they where now saying that to avoid fraud and respect regulation they where now asking for ID’s. So they where now stealing identity as well!

I scan the website again and this time it was on another provider that I forgot now (It make about 5 month’s of that for the records).

I then confronted her and she kinda understand that I was responsible for having the website closed in the first place and the last message that she send me was “Take care” with a picture from inside a plane, so god’s know where she is right now and there’s not much to do legally as she have deleted all her account right after this.

So the best i can do is to share this story with you and hope that you will never fall for such scams because they are very popular and talented.

And as stated on our home page (information provided by the FBI) less then 9% of the money stolen from cyber-crimes is restored to the owner, so you better learn to prevent then being victim of frauds, and this is why our website exist!

This is the end of the article I truly hope that it will help reducing the amounts of victims!

Our Promess

We promise you to always be honest and transparent with you at MRichard333.com - We have been non-profits (Not officially registered) for about 3 years and we just launch web services for website owners and discord bot owners so you are free to have a look here if that interest you, perhaps the best thing is that we also have an affiliate program where you can earn 25% for every persons that you refer to our online services!

Apply here to our Affiliate Program

If that can help you get back your lost money, I would be pleased : )

Oh and I was almost forgeting the most important part, yes investing in crypto is risky and I don’t encourage you to do so, perhaps there’s legit platform like Binance that are reputed worldwide

And how you verify a business especially the kind of business like stock exchange, is troughs the Authority of Financial Market, at least it is how it work in Canada and in Europe as far as I know but the point is, that they must be registered with the Government in which country they operate (So search there company name on governmental website) if you don’t find it, I would say not to put any information or money.

And sometimes I use MyWot to report fraudulent website so you can always have a look at there index to see if there's reviews of users claiming this website to be malicious or fraudulent.

Well take care and please, have a look at our other articles!

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