Part 2: Dot-Con – Online fraud from the victim’s perspective

As a reminder, this is the second part in a series about how internet scams no longer only victimize the naïve.  You’ll see in the two stories I’ll tell that intelligent, educated people fall for these scams because the scams have gotten more sophisticated and more difficult to report.

The first case involves “Paul”, a 29-year old medical doctor who lives in Europe. He received an email from a Barrister in London that said a relative of Paul’s had passed away and the Barrister was told to contact Paul about an inheritance left to him (~$7M).  Paul was told that he needed to pay the VAT tax on the inheritance money and then the money would be released to him.

The Barrister was very convincing.  He used words like “friendship” and “cooperation” to make Paul feel comfortable about the transaction.  The Barrister sent documents to Paul that looked legitimate.  You can see here the Affidavit that was sent, the death certificate, and the Stop Order that explains the taxes owed on the inheritance.  Since Paul does not live in England, it was difficult for him to confirm the legitimacy of this process or these documents.  The bad guys are spinning tales that are extremely convincing.

This is where the story takes a bad turn.  Paul took out a loan to pay for the taxes on his “inheritance” and sent the money via Western Union to the “Barrister”.  In the end he sent the scammer over 7000GBP.   Paul will be paying back the loan on this scam for the next five years.

In the next installment I’ll tell another story about someone who was scammed.  And in follow-up posts I’ll talk about what these people did to try to get help.