With an online relationship this never happens. The faked romances can last for a long time — the longest the researchers heard of was five years — with each criminal juggling a series of parallel relationships. At some point comes the request for urgent financial assistance, often to help them out of supposed difficulty.

If this happens, they'll ask for money. It's like a clever marketing ploy. Very few cases are seemingly reported. A spokesman for the UK's National Fraud Authority said the agency had learned of crimes over the past 15 months, totalling £8m in losses. The survey, covering more than 2, people, found that just over half were aware that such romance scams existed.

While this was a positive sign, Colin Woodcock of Soca said, significant numbers of people remained at risk. Soca has compiled a list of tell-tale signs for people to look out for if they suspect their internet suitor is a con artist. When men are targeted, the other party often tends to be a nurse working in a remote country. The trio's hunch largely paid off.

They found men seeking long-term relationships post significantly more images of dogs than men seeking short-term relationships.

The findings didn't surprise one of Fisher's neighbours. She said she was speaking with him about the research and he remembered from his dating days how some men would go to Point Pleasant Park in Halifax with a dog and use it as a means of attracting women. To carry out the research, the study's authors looked at dating profiles for people living in Nova Scotia who were looking for long-term relationships.

They also looked at profiles of men looking for short-term relationships. Fisher said they couldn't find enough profiles for women seeking short-term relationships for an adequate sample. For women seeking long-term relationships, Fisher said they were just as likely to post photos of dependants as men seeking long-term relationships.

However, the photos were most likely to be of children. Fisher said there's a considerable body of literature that shows the No. The study was published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science. A study showed that reviewing multiple dating candidates online causes people to be more judgmental about them.

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More than , people in Britain may have been conned by fraudsters posing as would-be romantic partners on internet dating sites, according to the first study examining the potential scale of the problem.

Anti-fraud groups have warned for some time about scams, in which criminals create a false identity — often an army officer on active service, explaining an inability to meet in person — and develop a close online intimacy with a victim, who is then asked for cash to help their presumed suitor out of a crisis.

It had long been suspected that official figures for such crimes greatly under-represented their prevalence, largely because many victims feel too embarrassed or hurt to go to the police, or never realise they have been conned. Extrapolating this to the online UK population means more than , potential victims.

Monica Whitty, a psychologist and professor of contemporary media at Leicester University, said that the pool of those targeted was likely to be greater still as it did not include people who realised what was happening before they lost money and those who still did not realise they had been conned. There has been an assumption that victims tend to be middle-aged women.

However, said Whitty, targets were from both genders and all age groups. Aside from the financial costs involved — Soca has tracked individual losses ranging from £50 to £, — those conned also faced the heartbreak of discovering that the person with whom they had fallen in love was the invention of a skilled con artist, usually Nigerian or Ghanaian, and often not even of the same gender. The scams often begin with an online dating site profile carrying a notably attractive photo, taken from elsewhere on the internet, and a description of someone in a remote, hard-to-contact location — whether a military base in Afghanistan or, to tempt male victims, a UK or US nurse at a small foreign hospital.

The use of almost exclusively online communication — the criminals occasionally resort to phone calls but these are rare given the extra difficulty of explaining away an accent — can actually accelerate intimacy, Whitty said, allowing victims to project their own hopes and desires on to a warm and empathic correspondent.

Lots of people get in touch with someone through a dating site, meet them a few weeks later and this person doesn't live up to their expectations. With an online relationship this never happens. The faked romances can last for a long time — the longest the researchers heard of was five years — with each criminal juggling a series of parallel relationships. At some point comes the request for urgent financial assistance, often to help them out of supposed difficulty.

If this happens, they'll ask for money. It's like a clever marketing ploy. Very few cases are seemingly reported. A spokesman for the UK's National Fraud Authority said the agency had learned of crimes over the past 15 months, totalling £8m in losses. The survey, covering more than 2, people, found that just over half were aware that such romance scams existed.

While this was a positive sign, Colin Woodcock of Soca said, significant numbers of people remained at risk. Soca has compiled a list of tell-tale signs for people to look out for if they suspect their internet suitor is a con artist. When men are targeted, the other party often tends to be a nurse working in a remote country.

A fondness for Windows Messenger or similar applications: aware that dating sites are increasingly conscious of such cons, the perpetrators can be keen to continue their wooing elsewhere. But the con artists tend to select particularly alluring physical alter egos, which they borrow from elsewhere on the internet. A quick adoption of a pet name: if, by the second email, you are being addressed as "dearest fluffy bunny", beware — it could be a fraudster looking to establish instant intimacy.

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This article is more than 10 years old. Number of unreported cases likely to be far higher as individual losses range from £50 to £, Online dating scams, in which criminals create a false identity and then ask their suitor for cash, are on the rise, warns the organised crime watchdog.

Photograph: Alamy. Topics Online dating Dating Relationships Internet Scams Crime Social networking news. Reuse this content. Most viewed.

Is it a new match? In other words, users in the bracket were the most likely to use their apps at night and the least likely to use them in the afternoon. If you would like to share or use the data from this study, you are free to do so—as long as proper attribution is given. But men were only marginally better. One dead, two injured in stabbing at St.

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