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This article is more than 1 year old

Ruskie rats selling Choose-Your-Own-Adventure love scams

Call centre scammers charge $10 to seal the deal

Russians have delivered another blow to beleaguered love rats with the sale of automated and plug-and-play online dating scam packages.

The services are slung on underground crime sites and promise a response rate of 1.2 percent from love luckless men.

The rort will earn net scum US$2,000 a week if they send out 30 romance scams a day, cybercrime blogger Brian Krebs reports.

It means Russians will be able to send higher quality emails that follow a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure model in which scammers can use various text trees to con hopeful men.

The English is far from perfect sporting phrases like I "have a hankering to meet a good man to create a family", but it would pass the scam test for the less wary dating hopefuls.

Sellers offer tips to buyers, including starting the ruses with a purported email from the mother of the would-be daughter, followed by prefab excuses why phone calls cannot be answered.

After about a dozen emails are exchanged targeted men can be handed the phone number of a call centre staffed by women who play the role of the interested suitor.

The staff charge $10 a pop meaning their services are only employed for the most gullable men.

There a request is made for money for the typical scams such as urgent travel needs or Visa fees.

The packages include blacklists for email addresses of known whitehat security pests who waste scammers' time by dragging them along for a ride. ®

 

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