Scary Dating Scam Just Before Halloween!

Sadly, we have a rather timely scam that targeted a man about a week before Halloween, It is a very serious type of fraud and has been so frightening to some that at least three victims have committed suicide in the last six years in response. This fraud can be very brutally disturbing to the victim. Fortunately, the man who reported it to us last week figured out that it was a fraud, but he told us he was very shaken by it until he found our website describing this fraud. He was the 955th victim to report this scam to us. We’ve been reporting on this scam since it came to our attention in the Fall of 2016.

On October 7, a 36-year old man received a message on the dating app MeetMe that a young woman named Ashley had matched with him. Ashley’s profile said she was 21 years old and from Dupont, Colorado.  When the man contacted her with a simple “What’s up?” Ashley responded with two texts consisting of five words before asking the man for his personal cell number. Do our readers see any reason to be suspicious by how quickly Ashley wanted the man’s phone number? According to their website, MeetMe “helps you find new people nearby who share your interests and wants to chat now! It’s fun, friendly, and free!” To most of the world, MeetMe is another dating app and used for this purpose by millions of people. Would you believe that MeetMe’s Terms & Conditions state that users can be as young as 13 years old? That’s right. A 13-year old girl or boy can create a profile and meet strangers who are located in her/his area? As you might guess, this app has had it’s fair share of controversy. For example, the Wisconsin Department of Justice published a warning sheet for parents about MeetMe and in 2014 the San Francisco Attorney General sued MeetMe for their unsafe practices concerning children.  CommonSenseMedia.org, a well-respected service that evaluates apps, websites, games, etc. for age-appropriate use by children/teens, says that MeetMe is suitable for teens age 18 and older. Do you think you know what’s going to happen between 21-year old Ashley and her new match? Think again…

To protect the man’s identity, we’ll call him Jack. Jack shared this screenshot with us (below) of his very first text exchange with Ashley on MeetMe. It clearly shows that she is from Dupont, CO and is listed as age 21.

After a one-hour exchange of texts between Jack and Ashley, Jack received a rather surprising picture from Ashley that he hadn’t requested. Ashley sent Jack a partially naked photo of herself. Caught off guard, Jack replied in kind and it wasn’t long after that Ashley said she had to go. The next day, Jack received a phone call from a supposed Colorado police officer using the phone number 719-361-1264. The officer claimed that a father had filed a complaint with the police, saying that Jack had traded sexually explicit photos with his 15-year old daughter. Understandably, Jack was shocked to hear this. Afterall, Ashley’s profile said she was 21-years old, not a minor age 15. However, the police officer urged Jack to speak with the father, claiming that the father wanted to settle this issue out of court. As you can guess, Jack was really upset and scared.

Within minutes of getting off the phone with the police officer, Jack received a phone call from the father, a man named David Alexander. (David Alexander used the phone number 864-816-3086 and his wife also texted Jack and used the number 839-232-5387.) David Alexander told Jack that his daughter was 15-years old and he had already hired a lawyer to help him deal with this situation of having a grown man trade naked photos with his underage daughter. But, he said, he was willing to avoid the court system and charging Jack as a sexual predator IF Jack was willing to pay half of the lawyer’s fees to have a “Non-Disclosure Agreement” written and signed. The father wanted to make sure that Jack wouldn’t talk about this experience with Ashley and that he had deleted her photo and wouldn’t share it with anyone. Even the police officer called Jack and left a message that he wouldn’t be prosecuted if he signed the NDA and paid for half of the lawyer’s fees…

Of course, this was all BS and a form of extortion. Let’s start with the fact that NO POLICE OFFICER would call Jack and urge him to settle with the father! Also, no father would have visited an attorney within 24 hours and have an NDA Agreement drawn up! But Jack was sent an invoice from David Alexander showing the cost of the NDA and attorney fees, all via text. The Attorney was listed as the Marrison Family Law Firm in Colorado Springs, Colorado. When Jack saw the cost for the attorney’s fees and the NDA, he was shocked.  The total cost listed on the invoice was $5,708 and the father asked him to cover $2900 of this.  Feeling pressured, Jack made an initial payment of $1,100 to David Alexander through Zelle for half of those fees. We hope that our readers see lots of warning signs in this story because what supposedly happened to Jack is a complete fraud! If you look carefully at the invoice below, you may see that it contains several obvious signs of being a fake invoice! We count five mistakes in this invoice, a few of which are critical indicating this is part of a fraud.  NO LEGITIMATE Lawyer would include these errors. However, because we know that many of the scammers behind this fraud read our articles about it, we are not going to point out the errors in this invoice.  We did, however, call the REAL Marrison Family Law firm in Colorado and speak with their office manager.  She was not aware that her firm was being falsely used by these fraudsters. She also told us that their law firm does not handle Non-Disclosure Agreements at all!

The Non-Disclosure Agreement that these scammers created and sent to the man also contained two particular red flags indicating that the document was a fraud. One of these red flags was significant but again, because these scammers sometimes read our articles, we won’t point out these errors either. We wondered where these scammers actually came up with an NDA that looked fairly professionally done. It took us less than two minutes in a Google search to find the exact document they copied and manipulated.

If you read the sample texts below from both “David Alexander and his wife” sent to the victim, you can see how this man felt pressured to pay half of the fees from the law firm.

This fraud is just another example of the “underage girl sext scam” that we’ve been reporting on since 2016. More than 950 men have reported this fraud to us and we have even posted a number of their voice messages and recorded calls on this webpage about this fraud.  In fact, after Jack became suspicious about David Alexander’s claim, he found our article in a Google search and told us that one of the voices he listened to on our site sounds just like the police officer he spoke with and you heard in the voice message above. You can clearly hear the southern accent in this man. Moreover, we have reported that the primary perpetrators of this scam are already in a S. Carolina jail and use smuggled phones and people on the outside of jail to continue this fraud. We believe that it is still this group of incarcerated men who are likely running this fraud. Why else would they want Jack to wire his payment to David Alexander’s niece who is supposedly in college in South Carolina? (See texts below.)

Fortunately, after finding our website and talking with us, he understood that this extortion was a fraud and reported it to the local police, the FBI and the S. Carolina Attorney General’s office. Another interesting coincidence about this particular scary fraud is that over the last eight years of reports from 954 other men, one of the most commonly used names for the underage girl is Ashley! Over the years we’ve heard many variations of this frightening scam and, as we said in our opening paragraph, we know of 3 men who committed suicide because they thought that their lives were over when the scammers threatened to charge them as sexual predators of underage girls. We’re pretty confident that the overwhelming majority of these scams are coming from the same group of fraudsters in the S.Carolina jail. In July of 2023 we were contacted by another young man who also sent us a short audio recording left on his phone. We think it sounds very similar to, if not the same as, the audio above in Jack’s story.

The victim who contacted us in July, 2023 said “I met a girl on POF [Plenty of Fish] and we exchanged pictures. Out of nowhere I got a call from a investigator, a Mr. Morisaki and said that I could have charges bought against me so and I should speak the to the father: he said he had 2,800 in damages and if I paid he would too to the cops. I sent the money out of fear and he said we were good. After I sent the money I blocked and deleted everything thinking it was over. But I got a text today from a unknown number saying that his daughter attempted suicide and left my name in the note and said that therapy is 8,500 dollars. He said he would let the courts handle everything now and return the money I sent and he was contacting the officer again. I don’t know what to do or if this is real. I said he was trying to possibly extort me and said he was recording my conversation and he was sending that to the cops. I’m scared. What do I do?”

This fraud has been very frightening for many of the victims! To read much more about it, check out these articles on our website:

• Plenty of Fish Has Plenty of Sharks (Most up to date article about this fraud)
• Underage Girl Sext Scam (1st article published in 2016)

Last week Rob also shared with us that he discovered a fake web business that offers website creation and hosting services. Over the last decade we have found hundreds of fake businesses online but this is the first time anyone had ever shown us a phony webhosting service! And we fully agree with Rob! Here are some of the major red flags that lead us to suspect that CloudHostingAI[.]com is a fake business….

• On their website, CloudHostingAI[.]com claims they were founded in 2005 and now have more than 1200 employees and more than 100 awards. But their domain CloudHostingAI[.]com was registered last year on July 5th!
• Their CEO & Founder is shown as “Samuel Chapman.” That’s also very interesting because we’ve found this same name as the CEO & Founder of lots of fake banks we’ve exposed in the last 2 weeks. (If you want to see for yourself, check out this Google search. Most of the links returned are for fake banks.)

The business CloudHostingAI[.]com lists their address as 5905 Pinecreek Rd, Forest Park, GA. Google tells us that this address is a small 3-bedroom home in a very residential area. Does that sound like a legitimate “world-class web hosting company” to you?

This Reddit member posted that a friend was deep into the lies of a pig butchering scam with a young Asian lady that he thought was his new online girlfriend. The woman was advising him about cryptocurrency investments. (**eyeroll**) He posted these screenshots of some of his conversations with her:

Do you own a newer HP Printer?  Some new owners are finding that their printer stops printing if they don’t continue paying a monthly fee to HP, even if there is ink left in the cartridges they’ve purchased!  Sounds crazy and very scam-like to us! Check out this Youtube video about these subscription-based purchases that feel very scammy!

We have many articles and a video of interest for readers this week. Starting with this example of a likely ticket-selling scam that a Reddit member posted recently….

https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1g4939k/do_you_think_im_gonna_get_scammed/

These are tricks used by cybercriminals to try to take over your Gmail account…

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/watch-gmail-account-takeover-scam-121826913.html

The Federal Trade Commission recently advised consumers about TSA Precheck scams!

https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/10/how-avoid-tsa-precheck-scams

Remember to check out our monthly Podcast series! https://www.securewon.com/resources/podcasts/

Email Account to be Deactivated, iPhone Purchase

Last week an Accountant sent us this phishing scam that was made to look like it came to him from his own business. Instead of pointing to his business, the link pointed to a weird website called TopWearItAll[.]com, which was registered in Japan about two and one-half months earlier. This proves, once again, how important it is to mouse-over links and look at them before you click them, AND to look at the source of an email within the greater than, less than symbols < > and not at the text field that precedes it.

The woman who sent us this phishing email did NOT purchase a new iPhone! But more importantly, she immediately recognized that this rotten phish came from a free Gmail account and NOT from Paypal or any legitimate business. The scammers put the woman’s name into the text field of the email to get her attention. Of course, the 808-444-2901 phone number is a scammer’s number!

Deeeeeleeeeeete!

Report your smelly phish to us and Google!

https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/

Job Scam from Destiny About Loyalty Lion

Earlier in October, I was contacted by a woman named Destiny via a random text. She claimed to represent the company called Loyalty Lion, a customer loyalty and engagement platform for ecommerce brands. The job offer paid $1000 every four days! Wow! After asking me if I was interested in the job, she asked me to contact another woman by text named Sophia on her phone number 617-590-0418 to learn more. Sophia’s profile image showed her to be a beautiful, young woman with a big smile. (Hmmmm… this is a common tactic used by scammers.) Sophia claimed to live in Jackson, Florida. As this was just a couple of weeks after Hurricane Helene I asked her if she was OK. She seemed uninterested by my question.  I decided to play along just a little while before asking an unexpected question. My question was first meant to be empathetic towards these scammers. “Sophia” was not pleased, as you’ll read in the conversation below.

Scary Search Results in Google!

Last week, I happened to take out my cell phone, open my web browser and type in YouTube.com. HOWEVER, instead of tapping the letter u in tube, I accidentally hit the letter i right next to it. Without realizing I had done so, my browser went off to youtibe[.]com. As I looked at my phone, I saw that it was immediately redirected to another website that clearly wasn’t YouTube and I quickly stopped it. Then I saw what I had done and I wondered, could youtibe[.]com be harmful? I asked VirusTotal to evaluate this website and it told me that NINE security services found youtibe[.]com to be malicious, including hosting malware!  I was amazed by how easy it was to step into that trap. Of course I completely cleared my browser’s cache files, history and checked to make sure malicious extensions or apps had not been added to my phone. This dangerous misstep was related to a simple fat-fingered typo for YouTube, one of the most popular sites on the Internet! I wondered how common this risk might be, so I investigated other popular sites. Once again, I was flabbergasted by my findings! Below are the results from VirusTotal for common misspellings for seven of the most popular websites on the Internet. Clearly, cybercriminals know it is likely that people wll misspell or make typos when entering a website name and these criminals have placed bear traps ready to snap at you when you do! The worst of these traps is for a Google misspelling: Goggle[.]com!  Beware of how you type and spell! Other malicious sites included tiktik[.]com, facebok[.]com, instgram[.]com, yaho[.]com and whatsap[.]com.

Fake Toll Service & Another Pig Butchering Scam Text!

Posted on Reddit, a member who used to live in North Carolina received a text pretending to be from the North Carolina Toll Service. “I live in Georgia now, but still have me Western North Carolina phone number. I get a spam alert on my texting app and take a look expecting it to be more political bullshit. I found this and it actually tricked me for a second till I realized that the real toll system is the NC Quick Pass, not NcQuickPass.”

But most importantly, the domain used in this fraud is nctollinvoices[.]com. This domain was registered just hours before the text was sent and this website is hosted on a server in Finland!

Pig butchering scammers continue to send random emails to people in an effort to become your new best friend! Check out this effort that a reader received and reported to us….

Until next week, surf safely!

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