1. A SCAM ON PLENTY OF FISH. AND A SCAM POF CUSTOMER CARE TEAM! A woman in the USA was contacted and met a fake account on Plenty of Fish. PERRY MILES in Syria. Who wanted to send her a package of gold and diamonds!! And her pay for it of course.
2. Officials called this type of scam 'plenty of fish scam', and said that internet searches yielded several stories from the past few years of the same scam, often with successful results for the.

A little over a month ago, Ernie* (not his real name) decided to take a plunge into the dating world again. Nearly five months had passed since the brown-eyed twenty-something and his girlfriend of three years had split up, and he was feeling the curiosity rebuilding in his love life again.

Ernie opted for a more casual and less intimidating approach than going to bars: an online dating community. One night after work, he downloaded the Plenty of Fish (POF) phone app and carefully filled in his dating profile. In the short amount of time it took him to create, he had already begun to see the potential in online dating, where romantically charged conversations and sexually persuasive motives abound.

“For my POF profile, I uploaded my freshest selfie and I said that I play guitar and I have a few cats,” says Ernie. “You have to be catchy so the women who are scrolling through POF will be like, ‘Hey, this guy actually does stuff.’” He felt like his profile was strong enough to persuade other singles, so it was no surprise when he ended up with a few interested ladies that he conversed with briefly through the app’s messaging service.

There was one such woman though, “Lola” (or so she let on), who instantly grabbed Ernie by the virtual hand and lured him out of the Plenty of Fish app, straight into her text messaging inbox. Their texts quickly turned into sexts, as “Lola” grew increasingly generous with sending naked photos to Ernie.

“I was blown away that a girl messaged me nudes so fast,” Ernie explains. “But some of her nudes were inconsistent with her Plenty of Fish profile pic.”

Man pleads guilty in Va. To stealing $276K in online dating scams. By Associated Press. Sunday, May 23rd 2021. Plenty of Fish, a Canadian online dating service, was one of the platforms.

To Ernie, it almost sounded too good to be true. Most everyone knows about catfishing, where the person on the other end isn’t who advertises themselves to be. Unfortunately for Ernie, he learned the hard way about the embarrassing caveat. From here, he quickly became a victim of blackmail.

Online dating is an alluring and efficient digital medium where pushing the boundaries thrives on the cloak of anonymity. Anyone can be who they want and say what they want because the exit strategy is flawless, simply close the app.

But what happens when the safety net of anonymity is ripped away and you find yourself not so anonymous anymore and fearful of the permanence of the Internet? Diving deeper into the interview with Ernie, it became clearer his experience began innocent enough, merely accepting naked photos from someone “18 years old.” Yet as the two got further into it, “Lola” released a bombshell to Ernie, and the entire mission was forced to be aborted.

“Your pics made me cum…I have to tell you somethin…I’m 17. But I’m literally going to be 18. My bday is in January. Let’s celebrate…,” she said through text.

“I didn’t exactly tell her not to send any more pics,” Ernie admits. “I just stopped responding and kind of silently relented because she is underage.”

Sexting among teens has continued to follow a positive statistical trend. DoSomething.org reports that 24 percent of high school teens (ages 14 to 17) and 33 percent of college students (ages 18 to 24) have been involved in a form of nude sexting at least once. Furthermore, 15 percent of teens who have sent or posted nude/semi-nude images of themselves send these messages to people they have never met, but know from the Internet.

One Denver lawyer explains the alleged underage individual has an unfair angle by withholding pertinent age information, and once the individual does provide their true age, the other party may not understand the implications from that point on.

“That is the downfall of technology,” says the attorney. “Technology doesn’t always have a gatekeeper.”

Everything in this particular area of dating is following the same positive trend. Dating platforms are increasingly growing in membership size, and sexting among teens continues to increase in popularity. Plenty of Fish made its debut to the online dating scene in 2003, and since has garnered nearly 90 million users in ten different countries. In an article published by consumer data researchers at Best Company, the provided statistics illustrate the magnitude of reach Plenty of Fish has attained, and to say that POF only slightly surpasses other top dating sites is a severe understatement.

Adding together the total memberships of Match.com (21.5 million), eHarmony (15.5 million) and Zoosk (25 million), the sum of those numbers still doesn’t reach the heights of Plenty of Fish. And where there’s lonely singles, there are those out there willing to exploit them for cash.

Following her admittance to being under 18, the conversation between Ernie and “Lola” fizzled out, eventually becoming radio-silence.

Ernie thought he had dodged a bullet, that he would never hear from her again if he just ghosted. That proved to be only partially true, as the steamy sexting session quickly devolved into the sinister.

After a few days, he began to receive several suspicious phone calls and voicemails from a person claiming to be a private investigator — and an irate father. The “father” argued that Ernie had been sharing inappropriate photos with his underage daughter, “Lola.” Furthermore, the father figure was demanding that Ernie pay him the cost to cover the private investigator he hired in order to find out the details of his daughter’s “secret” life.

“I was terrified when I listened to the voicemails,” says Ernie. “I had this private investigator on my voicemail telling me that I am facing 33 years in prison for engaging in sexual texts with an underage girl and I’m over here at work trying to serve customers drinks in pineapples while my life is falling apart!”

CBS News reports the most common scamming indicator to look for with online dating websites is con artists who want to quickly move their potential victims off the dating website. Dating websites have the ability to monitor and boot members who exhibit problematic behavior or are perpetrating scams. This forces con artists to shift their victims elsewhere with claims of their membership ending or other reasons of why they can’t remain on the website.

“I totally freaked out and called one of my family members and was like, ‘Holy shit! Someone is trying to file criminal charges against me and extort me for hundreds of dollars for sexting with their daughter!’” Ernie exclaims.

Scams related to money and romance are infamous in the dating demographic. Consumer Reports released data that shows romantic scam information represents just the tip of the iceberg. And according to the FBI, romance and money scams cost consumers more money than any other kind of Internet fraud. In 2015, the most recent year with data available, people collectively lost more than $200 million through these scamming avenues.

Ernie says the alleged private investigator and irate father were very adamant: pay the father $900 to reimburse him for what he paid for the private investigator, or he would not retract the criminal complaint that he made with the police department where he and his daughter live, in South Carolina.

Though the Denver attorney sees right through that kind of behavior. “You cannot withdraw a criminal complaint,” they say. “A criminal complaint has to be done in a court or at a higher level of authority, and not from the person who submitted originally, especially with matters pertaining to individuals under age 18.”

After hearing from his own lawyer that he was likely being scammed, Ernie opted to just ignore the shady trio and hold onto his $900. Lesson learned.

“I am not going back on a dating site for a while,” says Ernie. *closes app*

If you feel you have been scammed by a person claiming to be a U.S. Soldier, contact the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center and the Federal Trade Commission.

Army CID is warning anyone who is involved in online dating to proceed with caution when corresponding with persons claiming to be U.S. Soldiers currently serving in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or elsewhere.

Army CID receives hundreds of allegations a month from victims who state they got involved in an online relationship with someone, on a legitimate dating website or other social media website, who claims to be a U.S. Soldier. The 'Soldier' then begins asking for money for various FALSE, service-related needs such as transportation costs, communication fees, marriage, processing and medical fees. Victims of these online scams have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a very low possibility of recovery.

The U.S. has established numerous task force organizations to deal with this growing epidemic; unfortunately, many times the people committing these scams are from African countries using untraceable email addresses, routing accounts through numerous locations around the world and utilizing pay per hour Internet cyber cafes, which often times maintain no accountability of use.

Read the Joint Service Sextortion Brochure for more information and see examples of fake documents used by scammers.

You can also learn more about identity theft, romance scams, sextortion and online impostors at the U.S. Army's Social Media Resources site.

For more on these fraudulent acts, read the announcements released by Army CID:
U.S. Army CID Warn Citizens to Be Vigilant Against Internet, Digital Scammers
With National Spotlight on Internet Romance-Type Scams, Army CID Makes Additional Attempts to Warn Unsuspecting Victims
U.S. Army CID Pleads with Public, Warns Against Romance Scams
CID warns Army community about social media impersonation of Soldier accounts

• - DO NOT SEND MONEY! Be extremely suspicious if you are asked for money for transportation costs, communication fees or marriage processing and medical fees via Western Union.
• - If you do start an Internet-based relationship with someone, check them out, research what they are telling you with someone who would know, such as a current or former service member.
• - Be very suspicious if you never get to actually speak with the person on the phone or are told you cannot write or receive letters in the mail. Servicemen and women serving overseas will often have an APO or FPO mailing address. Internet or not, service members always appreciate a letter in the mail.
• - Many of the negative claims made about the military and the supposed lack of support and services provided to troops overseas are far from reality - check the facts.
• - Be very suspicious if you are asked to send money or ship property to a third party or company. Often times the company exists, but has no idea or is not a part of the scam.
• - Be very suspicious if the person you are corresponding with wants you to mail anything to an African country.
• - Be aware of common spelling, grammatical or language errors in the emails.
• - Be very suspicious of someone you have never met and who pledges their love at warp speed.

Saying they are on a peace keeping mission, looking for an honest woman, parents deceased, wife deceased, child being cared for by nanny or other guardian, profess their love almost immediately, refer to you as 'my love,' 'my darling' or any other affectionate term almost immediately, telling you they cannot wait to be with you, telling you they cannot talk on the phone or via webcam due to security reasons, or telling you they are sending you something (money, jewelry) through a diplomat. Finally, they claim to be a U.S. Army Soldier; however, their English and grammar do not match that of someone born and raised in the United States.

Here are answers to some of the most common types of scams:

• 1. Soldiers and their loved ones are not charged money so that the Soldier can go on leave.
• 2. No one is required to request leave on behalf of a Soldier.
• 3. A general officer will not correspond with you on behalf of a Soldier planning to take leave.
• 4. A general officer will not be a member of an internet dating site.
• 5. Soldiers are not charged money or taxes to secure communications or leave.
• 6. Soldiers do not need permission to get married.
• 7. Soldiers do not have to pay for early retirement.
• 8. Soldiers have medical insurance for themselves and their immediate family members (spouse and/or children), which pays for their medical costs when treated at health care facilities worldwide - family and friends do not need to pay their medical expenses.
• 9. Military aircraft are not used to transport Privately Owned Vehicles.
• 10. Army financial offices are not used to help Soldiers buy or sell items of any kind.
• 11. Soldiers deployed to combat zones do not need to solicit money from the public to feed or house their troops.
• 12. Deployed Soldiers do not find large sums of money and do not need your help to get that money out of the country.

Report the theft to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) (FBI-NW3C Partnership). Online: http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx

Report the theft to the Federal Trade Commission. Your report helps law enforcement officials across the United States in their investigations. Online: http://www.ftc.gov/idtheft

By phone: 1-877-ID-THEFT (438-4338) or TTY, 1-866-653-4261

By mail: Identity Theft Clearinghouse, Federal Trade Commission, Washington, DC 20580

Plenty Of Fish Scam

Report the fraud to the Federal Trade Commission on Nigerian Scams. Email: spam@uce.gov.

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