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Introduction
The National Fraud Authority (2012) in the United Kingdom estimates that fraud costs in the United Kingdom equate to over £78 billion a year, with £35 billion lost to mass-marketing fraud. Mass-marketing fraud essentially exploits mass communication techniques (for example, email, instant messaging (IM), bulk mailing or telemarketing) to con individuals out of money. The Internet has opened up the floodgates to fraud given that criminals can use it to target many more potential victims. Mass-marketing fraud is a serious and organised crime. Examples include: foreign lotteries and sweepstakes, 419 scams, charity scams, romance scams and boiler room scams.
Criminologists have written much on the Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud (also known as the 419 scam because of the Section number of Nigerian criminal law that applies to it) but there is a scarcity of research available on other mass-marketing fraud scams. The Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud actually began in the 1970s as postal mail and faxes, and subsequently scammers took advantage of free email and mailing lists to target many more potential victims. In this scam, the criminals pretend that there is a large amount of funds that is trapped or frozen for a variety of reasons (for example, unclaimed estate, corrupt executive and dying Samaritan) and in each case they offer the recipient rich rewards for simply helping government officials or family members out of an embarrassing or legal problem (Whitty and Joinson, 2009).
This article focuses on one form of mass-marketing fraud, the Online Dating Romance Scam. In some ways, it is similar to advance fraud scams; however, the portrayed end goal for the victim is typically that they will be in a committed relationship rather than simply in receipt of large sums of money. Like the Nigerian email scam, it existed as postal mail prior to the Internet (and this form still exists). The postal mail form typically targeted men who purchased adult magazines with personal ads. The men would write to someone they believed to be a woman, who placed attractive photographs with themselves as either naked or very scantly clad (these were of course bogus photographs), with the intention to meet the woman. The criminal would develop a relationship with the victim often sending more photographs and then proceeded...