{"id":3260,"date":"2025-02-11T11:05:24","date_gmt":"2025-02-11T10:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lyfense-pro.mrmilu.com\/how-a-criminal-called-olivia-tried-to-steal-my-heart-and-my-money\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T11:19:39","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T10:19:39","slug":"how-a-criminal-called-olivia-tried-to-steal-my-heart-and-my-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lyfense.com\/en\/resources\/how-a-criminal-called-olivia-tried-to-steal-my-heart-and-my-money\/","title":{"rendered":"How Olivia tried to steal my money"},"content":{"rendered":"\nBy Greg Hancell, Head of Fraud Prevention, Lynx\r\n\r\nThe 2023 Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report<\/a>, found that more than one in every four adults has fallen victim to an online dating or romance scam globally. As we see a significant rise in romance and investment scams around the world, we are also seeing a rise in people suffering significant financial losses, heart break, and in some devastating cases, loss of life.\n\nHaving never used dating apps, I wanted to try my own investigation and understand how the scams are taking place on dating apps, versus, the scams that take place on platforms such as Facebook or Instagram.\n\nAccording to TSB<\/a>, over 80% of scams originate from Facebook, therefore Meta is both a transient communication channel and an originating channel for the scammers. However, with this in mind, I wanted to delve deeper into the world of dating\u2026and find out how romance scams can start on dating apps.\n

Looking for verified love<\/h3>\nThe first thing I did in my quest to find the scammers was to create a profile in a dating app. Like many looking for love, I entered my likes, some simple information about me such as my age, location, country of birth and what I am looking for. As someone new to dating apps, I was unaware of the significant difference between verified accounts and unverified accounts.\n\nA verified account is one where identification of that person has been confirmed through a specific process. They would have provided a photograph of their face within specific boundaries, taken through liveness detection (such as say a specific sentence, turn your head a particular way, blink, make a specific pose) and so forth, which would have then been verified by facial recognition.\n\nThe accounts that are verified are signalled by a blue shield. An unverified account simply needs an email address, or phone number to validate the device is receiving access to the account created. This therefore means anyone with contact details can impersonate someone on the app, scraping photos from an influencer and putting down their hobbies as an example.\n\nI, as I imagine many are, was unaware of this fatal flaw. It must be said that verification is important as it shows that someone is who they say they are.\n

How swiping almost got me scammed<\/h3>\nAfter being encouraged to \u201cswipe left\u201d and \u201cswipe right\u201d to determine people that I liked on the dating app, I started to get matches from people that apparently liked me back.\nAs someone completely new to using dating apps, it became apparent to me that all of those likes and all the people talking to me were criminals impersonating someone else. Maybe this is because I work in fraud and I speak on romance scams every day, but what also struck me were the commonalities between the profiles were as follows:\n