Monthly Archives: May 2024

Your Money Matters

If you have fallen victim to a romance fraudster, a scammer or a sextortion racket it is important not to feel isolated, humiliated or embarrassed – fraudsters are very good at manipulating people, they frequently operate in very large groups with many years of experience. It literally can happen to anyone.

Did you know that in 2023 alone 57,000 Americans were Scammed for over $638.6 million by fraudsters, not only have these victims been left out of pocket, but they’ve also been left humiliated, frightened, and heartbroken. Additionally, in the FBI’s 2022 IC3 report, it highlighted a 183 percent increase in the amount lost to crypto investment scams – a massive $2.57 billion in 2022 alone.

As a private investigator, I have taken on many cases from business fraud and crypto investment scams through to romance fraud, with victims having lost amounts varying between £15,000 and £1.2 million. Usually we can trace the scammer, but recovering funds can be difficult, particularly if the scammer is in a country which does not have a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) in place with the country that their victim resides in.

Have you just transferred money to a fraudster? If you have literally sent money today or within the last few hours or so then call your bank immediately as they may be able to stop the transaction. Stop reading this and go call your bank now, ask to speak to their fraud team.

Make sure you call the number printed on the back of your credit or debit card and not a phone number in any emails you have received, in case that email was faked by the fraudster and has their number instead.

If you have lost money to a fraudster then I’m afraid that there is no simple answer when it comes to recovering your funds. These are the steps you should take and with each is some additional detail about what can be tried. (I am based in the UK, so much of this information will apply to UK residents and regulations, but other countries may have similar solutions.)

1] Has the fraudster had remote access to your computer? If so turn it off immediately, or turn your Internet/WiFi router off to stop the computer from connecting to the Internet. (An IT professional will need to examine your computer to remove the remote access app and any other backdoor/viruses the fraudster may have installed).

2] Phone your bank – the bank you used to send the money – and speak to their fraud team right away. Use the phone number printed on the back of your credit or debit card. Tell the fraud team what has happened and ask them to try and stop the payment going through. (see below regarding APP fraud and the Contingent Reimbursement Model).

3] Inform the police. Realistically the police won’t be able to do an awful lot at this stage but it is an important step in this process. If you have fraud insurance cover (see 4 below) then you will need a crime reference number from the police to go with your insurance claim. Make sure you call your local police department directly or dial 101, and not the emergency services phone number (999/911 etc). The police will give you a crime reference number and will more than likely ask you to report it to Action Fraud if you are in the UK https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/reporting-fraud-and-cyber-crime

Another good reason to inform the police of the crime is that if the fraudster(s) are caught some point in the future and some or all of the funds are recovered by the authorities, the funds could be returned back to their victims.

4] Do you have insurance that covers losses due to fraud? If so call the insurance provider and tell them exactly what has happened. Note: most home insurance policies don’t include fraud or cyber crime cover by default. Business insurance often does include cyber crime cover, and if you are a business who is certified under the UK’s Cyber Essentials scheme, then you probably took the free cyber insurance as part of that scheme.

5] Sign up for a free credit monitoring service: The fraudster may now have your bank details or card details, they more than likely have your name and contact detail too. This could be enough for them to try and take out loans or apply for credit cards in your name. Signing up for a free credit monitoring service is a good way to help you keep a look out for anything like this. Some examples of companies offering free credit monitoring services are Experian and Credit Karma

What Can You Try To Get Your Money Back?

I don’t want to say ‘and now wait to hear from your bank, the police and insurance company’, but that’s more or less where things stand at this point. However there are things which you can do that may help;

Chase your bank, and keep chasing your bank. It can take them 30 days to come back to you regarding the initial part of their investigation, but if they were able to stop the payment going through then you should hear back the same day or following day.

If you sent the money via your bank, it is known as Authorised Push Payment fraud (APP). In the UK there is the Contingent Reimbursement Model (CRM), which is designed to reimburse victims of APP fraud – not all banks have signed up to this initiative yet, but most of the major ones have. In 2022, only two thirds of those making a claim for APP under the CRM were reimbursed, so you may have to keep pushing your bank in relation to this.

Crypto / Bitcoin: If you sent money using Bitcoin or any other crypto currency it is very difficult to recover. Firstly, if you initially transferred the money from your bank to your crypto exchange account, then you should talk to your bank about Authorised Push Payment fraud as that is what it is. Our findings with this is that the bank will say APP doesn’t apply because you sent it from one of your accounts (the bank) to another of your accounts (your account at the crypto exchange). But keep pushing your bank on this as crypto exchanges aren’t signed up to the Contingent Reimbursement Model.

Many types of crypto transactions can be traced easily – the wallet ID’s are publicly visible on the blockchain and you can see where the transaction went and follow its path. However without police involvement there is no way to see who owns those wallets, so I won’t go in to any further detail here as if you are not familiar with blockchain then what you see can be a bit misleading.

If you sent money via PayPal then you should open a dispute with PayPal right away. Make sure to emphasise that you are a victim of crime (fraud) and give them the crime reference number obtained from the police. PayPal can be a bit slow to respond, and you should bear in mind that the fraudster may have been using somebody else’s PayPal account that they have hacked – in which case PayPal might also need pushing hard to get a positive result.

If you sent money via a money transfer service, such as MoneyGram, PayPoint or Western Union then there is really nothing you can do I’m afraid. If the fraudster is ever caught they would more than likely have spent the cash by then. The same applies if you paid them with gift cards, such as the commonly requested iTunes gift card.

Can I Help You as a Private Investigator?

Maybe. My main concern here is cost. At this point you would have lost a significant sum to fraudsters and hiring a private investigator can be expensive. However if the fraud involves significant amounts of money and you would like to find out as much as you can, then we can look at taking on your case.

With about half a day of our time, we can run traces on the scammer(s), look at where your money has gone, etc. and make an assessment as to whether a full-blown investigation would be worthwhile.

Bear in mind that an initial check and trace takes half a day and would be £480 including VAT, and larger investigations can cost several thousand pounds. Specialist Investigations is where you can contact us if you would like us to take a look at your case. It is run by myself and former police detective, Mark Williams-Thomas.

Analysing their Photos

Until recently, the profile photographs used by fraudsters on their fake profiles were almost always stolen from the Internet; usually from online searches for models, porn actors or military personal. There is a lot of information in photographs that can help you ascertain whether the individual is Real or Catfish, i.e. a fraudster.

These stolen photographs are easy to check as you can take a screenshot of them, crop them to remove unnecessary elements and then use a search engine or special website to carry out a ‘reverse image search’ – this is explained fully further below, but it involves uploading the cropped screenshots to a site such as Google Reverse Image Search, Yandex, FaceCheck or PimEyes and those sites will look for matching images on the Internet, revealing where else they are used – where the fraudster stole them from.

In 2019 a website launched called This Person Does Not Exist, it was the first website to use Ai to generate unique photos that looked like a real person. It quickly became popular with scammers as a way to get simple profile photos for their fake accounts. Today Ai has progressed a lot further and now there are quite a few websites which can create detailed, realistic photos and videos of non-existent people and, of course, the fraudsters take advantage of these sites to create the images used on their fake profiles. Crucially, because the photos and videos created with Ai are unique, it renders a reverse image search almost pointless as the images won’t exist elsewhere else – except possibly if another victim of the fraudster has posted the same photos to a dating forum, Reddit, or social media to warn others.

When I carry out my investigations I have a multitude of specialist tools and databases available to me, including what is knows an Open-Source Intelligence Tools (OSINT).

What clues are in a photograph?

The obvious things to look at are the person themselves. Do their photographs look like they match with what the person has told you and how they describe themselves? Are they quite attractive, successful and wealthy looking? This is usually the first clue with any fraudster profiles.

Think about what else you can see in their photos, what objects are visible and do they match with what you’ve been told, here are some examples to get you under way;

1] What are they wearing? Military uniforms are very often a red flag as they are a favourite of fraudsters, do a Google image search to see if the uniform is that of the military in the country where they claim to live. In general, do any clothes they are wearing in the photos match with their work or lifestyle? Is there any writing on their t-shirt or jacket which might indicate where they work?

2] Look at the type of electrical sockets on the wall. Does the fraudster claim to live in Europe, but the sockets on the wall are north American? You can easily carry out a search for photos of electrical sockets used in each country.

3] Is there a ceiling fan? If the fraudster claims to live somewhere with a colder climate, like the UK, then having a ceiling fan in their living room or bedroom is something you wouldn’t expect to see.

4] Is there a calendar or a poster on the wall, can you see any writing on street signs? Do these items match the language and spellings used by the country where the fraudster claims to be?

5] What else is in view in the photos? Are any buildings in view? Are cars driving on the correct side of the road? What are other people wearing?

6] Are the photos generated by Ai (artificial intelligence)? Nowadays Ai is very good at generating images and video. Hair, skin tones and lighting may be the only clues to it being Ai generated, if you look closely at the skin then it often looks like a filter has been applied a bit too strongly and the stray ends of hair don’t quite look right.

7] Video calls manipulated by Ai – New Ai technology allows a scammer to have a video call with you and in real-time Ai will replace their face and voice with those of someone else, such as pictures of a model the scammer has downloaded from the Internet. This makes it very hard to spot a scammer nowadays – it has become so good that, instead, you need to trust your gut feeling and don’t get talked in to doing anything that involves sending money or making investments.

If you don’t know how to take a screenshot, then read these articles before continuing below:

How to take Screenshots on an iPhone or iPad

How to take Screenshots on an Android phone (such as Samsung)

Reverse Image Searching

As mentioned above, there are several ways that you can upload a screenshot of the fraudster’s profile photos to see if they have been taken from elsewhere, some methods are free and some are a paid service.

The best way to know for sure is to reverse image search all of the fraudster’s photos, not just a single photo, as often the searches can miss a match. And try to use more than one search engine to do the checks, don’t rely on just one of the search engines. These are the main search engines that I would recommend;

1] Google’s Reverse Image Search is no more: For some unknown reason Google has pretty much broken the ability to reverse search people and faces now. It used to be a very good and easy solution for people, but instead Google now force their Google Lens search on users – Google Lens is more aligned with product recognition (for shopping, i.e. affiliate links from which Google earns revenue).

2] Yandex – the Russian search engine: Another search engine similar to Google, but Russian and with very different search results https://yandex.com/images/ click on the camera icon to upload a photo.

3] PimEyes: Like FaceCheck, this is a paid service and the results can be seen for free without the ability to click and look deeper. It costs £14.99 to unlock the search results if you feel you need to do so. https://pimeyes.com this is my preferred reverse search engine as it is much more accurate than the others.

4] FaceCheck: Is a paid service (surprisingly payment must be made in Crypto currency!) but for free you can see the search results, just without the ability to click down and see any additional details, such as which website the image was found on. https://facecheck.id My experience with this one is that you get a lot of unwanted results of similar looking people, these are called ‘False Positives’ and can be misleading, and having to pay them with crypto concerns me.

By now you should have enough knowledge to confidently take screenshots of profile photos, crop them to remove the unwanted parts, analyse what you see in them and upload them to search engines to see where else they exist. Remember though, that a genuine person will have their images online too – you will need to look at the results to decide if you’ve found the real person’s social media accounts or the fraudster’s.

Next: Learn How to Check their Personal Information