Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Is the Tinder Swindler One in a Million?

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Spoiler alert: no! Jack Caporal, of The Motley Fool’s research service, tells Nicole how romance scams are on the rise… and Nicole tells you how to protect yourself. Not today, Simon! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Well, it doesn't. Charge for wasting our time. I will take a check. Like an old school check. You recognize her from anchoring on CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg. The only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. Nicole Lappin. Hi, I'm the Bumble Bandit.

You may have heard of the Tinder swindler. And you will have heard of me, too, once I get my Netflix deal in. Anywho, yes, there are many of us Swindlers out there. More and more every day, in fact. But we may be run out of business with financial experts like Nicole Lappin and the Motley Fool's Jack Caparol around. So, the choice is yours. Listen to Nicole and Jack's advice,

or end up funding me and my next Bumble Dates trip to Santorini. Have you ever sailed the Aegean Sea? It's beautiful this time of year and every time of year. Can you introduce yourself for folks who might not know you? Yes, I am Jack Caperell. I'm a financial research analyst at The Motley Fool. And the mission of The Fool is to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. So hopefully our conversation today does that.

Those are all my favorite things. Yes, please. I have to start by asking you, have you seen the Tinder swindler? Yes, I've seen it. I've read about it. I read like the original article that I think was published in a German newspaper that kind of uncovered the whole thing. And it's definitely a fascinating popcorn-worthy story, but it's also pretty tragic and pretty sad, I think. And it's important to remember that aspect of it also. It is both. Both can be true at the same time, as you know. Can you describe it for our audience if they haven't seen it? Yeah. So there is this man, Semen Leviev, I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.

And he had actually had a long history of other types of fraud and scams before he got into, you know, what the what the mood or what the documentary is about, which is his time basically scamming women under the pretenses that he was in a romantic relationship with them. And essentially what happened is he took on the name and posed as the son of a Russian Israeli diamond mogul, then used Tinder to meet women. He would take them on really crazy dates, private jets, nice hotels, etc. So very high end experiences and gifts. And he would establish a romantic relationship with these women. back to is that, you know, he was in danger. He had these kind of faceless, nameless enemies. His bodyguard would get beat up or stabbed and he would send bloody pictures and he would say,

you know, I'm in trouble. I just need you to wire me some money because, you know, for some reason he couldn't access his accounts. The women, you know, thinking that they were totally in love with him and were going to spend the rest of their lives with him, would send him some money. He wouldn't repay them. And then he would use that money to run the scam again with other women. And yeah, that's that's the Tinder swindler. Yeah, like a Ponzi scheme fraud situation that was completely bananas, as was reinventing Anna and the dropout that's coming out. So there have obviously been a lot of Hollywood movies or, I guess, miniseries around this topic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a trend or a pattern. But you guys at the Motley Fool Analysis Service, The Ascent, did a big study about this, and it could possibly be art imitating life. Yeah, so there's definitely,

as you mentioned, a trend in, you know, dramatizing these stories or following them in the form of a documentary. But we've also seen over the past couple years, them in the form of a documentary. But we've also seen over the past couple of years, at least more people reporting scams of all different types. So that includes romance scams like the Tinder swindler and also investment scams. There's been a big spike in cryptocurrency related scams as more and more people get interested and invested in crypto assets. And also during COVID, we've seen a big increase in imposter scams. So that includes romance scams, but also people posing as government officials, right? So there are a lot of questions about stimulus checks and other benefits during the height of the pandemic. And folks were looking to take it, scammers were looking to take advantage

of that. And another type of scam that we saw really spike during the pandemic, scams around medical treatments, right? If you send X amount of money to this person or this account, we'll hook you up with a vaccine, get you to the front of the line, or we'll get you this new COVID treatment, with a vaccine, get you to the front of the line, or we'll get you this new COVID treatment, or we'll get you a pack of these new COVID tests, right? And I think it's a combination of the pandemic really changing a lot of social dynamics and the way that people interacted with the world that created new opportunities for scammers. But I think it's also, you know, could just be scammers. But I think it's also, you know, could just be people being more aware of these scams happening right through all of the Hollywood attention that's being paid to them and being more likely to report scams, right? You know, scams have been going on since the Middle Ages,

if not earlier. You get the letter from the Lord saying, you know, my squire, he's found this like treasure trove, right? He's got all this loot, but he's been locked up and I just need, you know, 500 pieces of gold or whatever to let him free. And you can have part of the loot. People have been running scams for forever. That's real. That's like the OG scam. I don't know. I don't know if that's the OG scam. But people, people have been running scams for a long time. And they're all more or less the same. It's just like a pig with different color lipstick. Yeah. I mean, look, there's a special place in hell for people who try to fraud people who need medical help or COVID vaccines. I mean, it's just really sickening. If you look at some of the

scams that were on the rise during the pandemic, you mentioned the criminals who stole stimulus checks and unemployment benefits. How exactly does that happen? And I guess the bigger question is, how does identity theft work? So usually when it came to COVID scams and COVID fraud, folks would pose as a government official and they would say you a message, email, text message, or contact you through social media and say, you know, you have this stimulus money in an account, or you have these benefits in an account, they're tied up. In order to untie them, we need an account number, a bank account number, for example, or a credit card number, debit card number, or we need you to send some money to this account to pay a fee to unlock the money that's sitting there for you. And, you know, there's just a deluge of information that the American public had to contend with

during the height of the pandemic. And people would fall for these scams thinking, you know, if I turn over, if I just give this person or give this person who seems to be government official 50 bucks to pay a processing fee to get my stimulus check, it's great. I pay 50, I get 1200 in return and it's all good. But in reality, they were sending money to a scammer or they were giving a scammer information that could then be used to further defraud them. So this is what you guys talk about in the study as synthetic account fraud. Can you explain that more? It's like a combination of legit information and fake information. Can you explain that more? It's like a combination of legit information and fake information.

Yeah. So what essentially would happen is someone will take parts of your identity or a person's identity that's available publicly online, like a name or a stolen social security number. And then they'll use that to create a new identity that they can then go out and carry other types of scams with. And so you actually see this happen quite a bit with romance scams, where someone will kind of build a fake internet persona around publicly available information. They'll take someone's social media picture. They'll take someone else's name, their birthday, someone else's hobbies, build a persona, and then present that to their victim as a way to build trust. And what I would say is given how much information is out there on the internet and how much people are on social media privacy settings. Is everything out there kind of open for the world to see and access, even if you don't know the people who might be looking at your social media profile, et cetera? Because if it is, you know, I don't want to say that the chances are, but it's

certainly possible that someone could be looking to use that publicly available information to scam you or scam someone else. Hold on to your wallets, boys and girls. Money Rehab will be right back. Now for some more Money Rehab. now that I think about it, a million years ago when I got out of a long-term relationship and I was investigating dating apps for the first time because I kind of missed that while being in a relationship. And so I found this guy who pretended to be some Saudi prince or something, but I thought it was hilarious. And so I Googled it and it was all the same pictures. And he messaged me something like, I'm in Beverly Hills shopping for jewelry or something,

something. And obviously, I knew this was not him. So I just talked back to him thinking it was hilarious that I was entertaining myself. But I could definitely see how people could fall for something like that if you're using enough of the actual information that is Googleable. Yeah, so it's interesting. You touched on a couple of things. First is, you know, romance scammers will try and target people who have lost a loved one, husband or wife, or have just come out of a long-term relationship. And they can figure that out by looking at someone's information on social media, if they don't have that information available only to be seen by their friends. Right? I don't know if that happened to you.

That's extremely fucked up. Well, that's my point about digital hygiene making sure you know check those social media privacy settings and making sure that if you want just your friends to see things that's what your settings are set up to do um but the other thing is like if they're you know god forbid if somebody lost their spouse or something that seems like a thing that you know people will post about and, you know, get support from the community. It's crazy that you would have to protect something like that from being stolen. Yeah. Well, that's why, I mean, that's why romance scams in particular

are so tragic because they prey not just kind of on your bank account, but on like really real emotions that can be really difficult to grapple with. And if, you know, you're trying to get back into the dating scene after a tough relationship or right, God forbid you lose someone and your kind of first interaction is being scammed. I mean, what a terrible way, um, what a terrible thing to go through after a tragedy, after you're coming out of a hard time. So yeah, it is tough. The other thing that you mentioned, though, was the messages that were like, I'm shopping

in Beverly Hills, et cetera. And so obviously, a lot of these folks who are running these scams will kind of try and come off a certain way, right? Having money, living in cool places, doing interesting things. That's one route. There are many other kind of models that they play around with. thing because if you you immediately picked up on it being a scam and I wonder if that's because did it seem like the messages were kind of coming out of a script or a playbook like these messages could be sent to anybody that's a good question I also now want to double click on the other methods that people are using so we can uh let those be known um i think it was because there were a lot of pictures that were already online and you know i think typically when people are on dating apps even exclusive dating apps they use sort of more personal photos that aren't like their headshot or whatever. So that I think tipped me off. I've also recently been getting some DMs from Simon wannabe type people. And I think it's

hilarious. But you know, it's a great question. Thank you for turning the tables as to what got me thinking that it was a scam from the get-go. I don't know. Maybe I'm just a jaded, pessimistic human. It could be. I mean, sometimes, you know, the scammer comes off as almost like too cookie-cutter perfect. And that can be a little strange. Definitely if they're using pictures that seem a little bit off or if you run a reverse Google image search and that picture shows up associated with a bunch of other different people, like the person that you're not talking to, that's obviously... How do you do that? Huh? You just put... How do you do that?

You can copy the image or you can select screenshot the image and then email it to yourself. And then go to Google Images. And you should just be able to paste the image into the search. And Google will then search for the image, right? Instead of a usual text search, they'll search for the image right instead of a usual like text search they'll search for the image and so if this guy's headshot or his like picture with his dog or whatever shows up uh and is like linked to a bunch of other social media accounts with different names uh that's clearly an issue, right?

That's clearly a scam. This guy's picture has been scraped off the internet and is now being used by someone who isn't him. Yeah, I mean, it seems really obvious, but a lot of smart people fell for these scams. I mean, these people, you know, weren't like the victims of the Nigerian Prince scam, which intentionally goes after, you know, weren't like the victims of the Nigerian Prince scam, which intentionally goes after,

you know, less educated, lower income people. This this was these are very sophisticated. Now, I'm sure in the same way as like when you go through TSA, you have to take off your shoes now. And, you know, I think that now any attack or something is not going to happen that way. There will be some other permutation. I think that probably the copycats aren't going to do the exact same thing as these folks that have been so highly publicized. look out for as they're doing their own digital hygiene and as they're trying to suss out others in the romantic realm, especially. Yeah. So like I said, if you've never met the person or you've just video chatted with the person and they're asking for money, that's a pretty big red flag. If they basically always have an

excuse for why they can't meet, that's another pretty common tactic that romance scammers will use, right? So you asked about other kind of methods or models that romance scammers will take on. A lot of the time, they'll say that they're overseas, outside of the US or whatever country the person they're trying to scam is in. And they work in construction, they're overseas outside of the US or whatever country the person they're trying to scam is in. And they work in construction, they're on a project overseas, or they're deployed overseas in the military, or they're on business overseas, etc. They say that they'll meet up. And then something always comes up and they can't. The other thing that we talked about, if the profile seems too perfect, or a little bit off or a little bit cookie cutter, reverse image search, see what

comes up, see if that picture is being used elsewhere. And this is a funny one because it's like, we all have stalked people on social media, right? We all have stalked that person from 10, 15 years ago that we know on social media to like see what they're up to and see what they're doing you should probably do the same due diligence if not more with the person that you've just met on the dating app right um so just kind of think of it that way and if something odd comes up in their background um that could be a red flag um if you're using dating apps again like kind of be careful about links to social media, check to see what's publicly viewable on your social media profile.

Um, and then be really quick to other things, um, with romance scams. If the person you're talking to, if things start moving really fast, right. You've been like chatting for a day or two and they want to go from the app to texting or email. Um, and then after that, you know, within a week or a month, there's all this talk about spending the rest of your lives together and a match made in heaven and you two are destined for each other, et cetera. Um, and you haven't met the person, you know, like I'm a big believer, like love is real, right? People do fall for each other. But if you've only ever been texting with this person and it goes that quickly, that's another red flag, right? That's usually how scammers really try and build trust quickly and kind of they're telling people what they want to hear if they're

already on a dating app, right? So it makes it easier for them to build trust. And then once the trust is established, they then try and get money. And that's, that's the last tip. If someone who you haven't actually gone on like a physical date with and don't have a good sense of who they are, if they ask you for money if they're asking for a specific type of payment. So like gift cards were the most common type of payment method for romance scams in the last year. If they're asking for your credit card number or a crypto transfer or wire transfer, huge red flag. Because, you know, once that money is sent, it's basically impossible to get back. basically impossible to get back. And in those instances, like let's say you're really head over heels for this person and they ask you for money, it's always good to just ask, why are they asking me for money? Is there some other way that they could resolve the situation

that they're in short of asking me for money, right? So it's common for them to be like, you know, my brother is in the hospital or my dad is in the hospital and I need money to pay for an emergency medical fee. Well, what about the brother or the dad's friend? What about health insurance? Can the person's employer do something to help pay for the medical expense, et cetera?

Why are they asking me? But yeah, I know it's a lot, but you know, at the end of the day, it's all like pretty scammy behavior. If you know what I mean, it's just that they've dressed it up in the veil of a relationship and it, it kind of creates a filter in, into how you view the relationship that might make you more willing to send this person money ultimately. Um, but it's still a scam. So you more willing to send this person money ultimately. But it's still a scam. So you just have to keep that in mind.

Oh, the bumble bandit here once again. I know these tips seem obvious, but if you watch the Tinder swindler, you'll see how elaborate these scams really can be. And the more elaborate the scam, the more you can lose touch with reality. So keep these tips close, and you can be sure that when we meet,

you'll swipe left. Damn. Money Rehab is a production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Our producers are Morgan Lavoie and Mike Coscarelli. Executive producers are Nikki Etor and Will Pearson. Our mascots are Penny and Mimsy. Huge thanks to OG Money Rehab team Michelle Lanz for her development work,

Catherine Law for her production and writing magic, and Brandon Dickert for his editing, engineering, and sound design. And as always, thanks to you for finally investing in yourself so that you can get it together and get it all.