The Army is warning online daters about a disturbing form of scam: thieves pose as US soldiers stationed overseas, pledge their (fake) love to women, and then bilk them out of thousands. Some scammers even steal the identity of actual servicemen to make their pleas more plausible.
In an unexpectedly poetic memo last month, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CID) warned Americans to be wary of “scams promising true love, but only end up breaking hearts and bank accounts.” The organization released a similar memo last May — but, they say, “CID continues to receive hundreds of reports of various scams involving persons pretending to be U.S. Soldiers serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. The victims are most often unsuspecting women, 30 to 55 years old, who think they are romantically involved on the internet with an American Soldier, when in fact they are being cyber-robbed by perpetrators thousands of miles away.” The scammers are often based in African countries and accessing dating websites at cyber-cafes. Apparently they “will often take the true rank and name of a U.S. Soldier who is honorably serving his country somewhere in the world, marry that up with some photographs of a Soldier off the internet, and then build a false identity to begin prowling the internet for victims.” In an especially creepy variation, scammers take the identities of soldiers who have been killed.
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