In the days before Coronavirus and Lockdowns, there was always a great many dating offer emails, text messages, social media messages etc. These aim to entice men into believing that an attractive young woman is interested in them and wants a relationship.

Even with Coronavirus present, these messages still get sent out albeit in a slightly different form.

“Travel currently harder because of danger COVID-19 but this is good opportunity to get acquainted online”.

The message has a description of how attractive the non-existent 34 year old blonde woman is and then the qualities she is looking for in a man, including:-

• Good sense of humour
• Confidence
• Likes to surprise
• Strong character
• Optimistic
• Older than 35

These qualities are carefully chosen to pick the men the scammer wants to entice and to enable almost any man to feel he fits those criteria.

e.g. the older than 35 is to try to exclude men who are jobless or unlikely to have sufficient money to be worth conning.

For any man who falls for this con, there are a series of scams this leads into.

The most basic is just to get personal details that can be sold to other criminals. The more advanced scams lead to a series of payments as with standard romance scams or sometimes this leads to full scale identity theft.

Before Coronavirus, the scammers had to think up reasons why they could never meet up in person (that would show that the “attractive blonde woman” is actually a thieving male) but Coronavirus is the perfect excuse – no travel allowed.

If someone you do not know makes such an offer – it’s fake.

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