FBI says fraud on LinkedIn a ‘significant threat’ to platform and consumers ... “He asked me if I’m on LinkedIn for professional networking or if I’m looking for a job,” Soe said. “I never trust anybody, but we began talking and over time he gained my trust.” Soe said when the conversation eventually turned to investing, “he showed me how he’s profiting from his investments and told me I should start investing with crypto.com which I know is a legitimate website. I started with $400.” The fraudster convinced her to move her investments to a site he controlled. Over several months, Soe would make a total of nine transactions, which included bank loans and money borrowed from friends, hoping to use her earnings to start a small business. But Soe would soon learn that the connection she made on LinkedIn wasn’t who he said he was. In the end, she lost all of her funds. ... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/17/fbi...ificant-threat-to-platform-and-consumers.html My initial reaction to this: It bewilders me that people would trust an internet scammer enough to move their life savings over to a website that the scammer controls. Yeah, the scammers put a lot of work in to conning such people and gaining their trust, but there is still only so much a scammer can do to fool them; the rest is on them for not doing their due diligence and being more skeptical of someone they don't really know prompting them to give them all of their savings. The article goes on to quote Sean Ragan, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the San Francisco and Sacramento, California, field offices: “It’s not their fault that they were victimized,” Ragan said. “It’s the perpetrator’s fault. It’s the criminal’s fault. They spend their nights and days thinking about ways to victimize and defraud people. That’s how they make their money through illicit gains. And the people that fall victim to it, they’re victims.” Yes and no, buddy. The scammers are crooks and deserve most of the blame, but these people also fail to be sufficient skeptical of nice-sounding, professional-looking internet strangers whose identities they cannot even verify. The bottom line for me is that people need to be smarter than this if these crimes are to be prevented. This isn't like a robbery where someone breaks down some form of security and steals something; this is someone talking a victim into giving away their valuables willingly under false pretenses.
Sure people shouldn't be stupid. But the government should be going after, punishing, and helping prevent this type of fraud.
They are hitting dating sites as well. I was hit with this scam about a dozen times recently on dating sites. It got to the point that I could recognize the scam just by the "woman's" profile. 30s. Beautiful. States that she is highly educated and into finances. Financially independent but looking for much older men. There are other clues but those were very common. They pretend to show genuine interest but quickly start talking about all the money they made investing in crypto. And because they think you're so awesome, they want to share their secrets. The first one showed her hand early on. She explained what she wanted me to do [setting up an account on some site] and said to then send her a screen shot of my computer. LOL! The first time I saw this I knew it must be a scam but wanted to see where it went. Hilarious!
