Scammers are becoming ever more sophisticated - this is what the fightback looks like

Scammers are becoming ever more sophisticated - this is what the fightback looks like8 hours agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleShari VahlScam Secrets presenterBBCIn 2024, Kirsty, a woman in her 40s living in North Yorkshire, met a man on a dating website who said he was an English businessman working in Turkey.He shared a picture that he claimed was of himself showing his chiselled abs on the beach and claimed to be financially secure. He even used a banking website to persuade her he had $600,000 (£443,600) in savings.But after two weeks of chatting, he said he'd been mugged and his phone and computer had been stolen, and he asked her to buy him a phone and to pay some bills for him with her money. What happened next perfectly illustrates the international web that scammers weave.Kirsty bought a phone in the UK and posted it to a block of flats in northern Cyprus, where the man told her he was visiting for work, and bit by bit over a period of two months she transferred £80,000 from her bank account. She'd borrowed £50,000 of it from her family, in the belief the man she loved was in trouble. All on his promise he'd pay her back as soon as he could get back into his bank account.But in fact the phone ended up in Lagos, Nigeria, and the £80,000 went to people with Nigerian, Romanian and other European names via money transfer services. The man was not British, but Nigerian, using a voice disguiser to deceive his target.Even the banking website he had shown Kirsty shortly after meeting her turned out to be a very sophisticated fake registered in the US city of Baltimore.Thousands of people are duped into handing over personal information and money in the UK every yearKirsty is just one victim of what experts say has been a surge in scams since the Covid lockdowns of the early 2020s. Global fraud losses are now over half a trillion dollars a year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.Reports of romance scams such as Kirsty's rose by 20% i...