She met “Owen,” who described himself as a single father toiling on an off-shore oil rig near Istanbul.īerens is with the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His mother met a strangerĪt the University of Southern California (USC), digital strategist Brad Berens grew interested in WWF scams when his mother, whom he calls “nobody's fool,” mentioned an odd experience while playing. Her family contacted the detective and together they staged an intervention that “finally convinced her that it's a scam,” he says, but the family still doesn't know how much money she's lost. In another case he's probing, a woman in her 60s sent Bitcoin, a virtual currency difficult to trace, to a man she met on WWF. "Loneliness is insipid and does crazy things to people,” the detective says, “and makes them do things they wouldn't normally do." An ironclad rule to avoid being fleeced: Never send money to a virtual love interest whom you haven't met in person. Victims “really want to believe these people are living exciting lives … working on oil rigs, traveling through Africa.” Such tall tales are a ruse to avoid meeting in person. Some have infrequent contact with relatives or live in care facilities. “The people who are targeted are afflicted with loneliness,” he says.
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Zynga, the San Francisco-based company that created it, did not respond to requests for comment for this story but offers online tips on how to block other users and report abuse.Īltiere says romance frauds have much in common. That WWF is haunted by hustlers is not surprising. In 2018, people lost $143 million to romance scams, the Federal Trade Commission says. More than $100 million lost to romance scams The fraudster in the case used an alias, is probably overseas and the photos he sent her were not his - they were stolen from the internet.
“We're not catching these people and they are not going to jail,” he says. He tells AARP that he spends much of his time investigating romance scams and, in the case at hand, there is little hope the woman will recover her money. Not until he urged her to sell her jewelry and her house did she realize that it was all an elaborate hoax, as some of her friends had warned.Īfter the woman reported her loss, Detective Patrick Altiere, 45, a 16-year veteran of the Washington County (Oregon) Sheriff's Office, stepped in to investigate. Over eight or nine months she parted with her life savings, about $137,000, by buying him gift cards and sending bank wire transfers. But as their digital relationship grew, his emergencies - and pleas for funds - kept coming. He promised to pay her back with interest. He lied, saying he used them to call his children the cards actually are used for movies and music, and are a popular currency among bad actors. After a month of increasingly intimate chats online and over the phone, he hit her up for iTunes cards worth between $5 and $25. He was friendly - and seemed interesting, saying he was a native of Italy and worked on an oil rig near Texas. In fact, they may be romance scammers.Įarly in 2018, a 75-year-old woman living near Portland, Oregon, began trading messages with a man on the WFF app. The strangers you meet on what players call “WWF” may not be real friends. The popular online game traces its roots to Scrabble, the hit board game that debuted in 1938.īe very careful.
En español | You might think it's fine to instant message others when playing Words With Friends.
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