I have written many times in Scamicide.com and in my book “The Truth About Avoiding Scams” about romance scams.  Most of these online dating and romance scams involve some variation of the person you meet though an online dating site quickly falling in love with you and then, under a wide variety of pretenses, asking for money.  However, recently in a new study done jointly by University College London and Jiayuan, China’s largest online dating service some new types of romance scams were identified and one is particularly insidious.

It starts with a local high-end restaurant hiring a beautiful woman who puts her profile on line with a dating service.  Once contact is made with a potential suitor/victim, the woman persuades her new friend to take her to the restaurant that hired her where she manages to run up a tab, which in some instances has been as much as $2,000.  The suitor/victim pays the bill who then vanishes from his life, never to be seen again.  According to the study, this scam was used with members of the Jiayuan dating site more than 57,000 times.

TIPS

Online dating can be very effective, but it is also extremely risky.  Of course, you want to be particularly wary of anyone, who early in the relationship finds some excuse to ask for money, but as the University College London study shows, there are other ways you can find yourself at risk.  In regard to protecting yourself from this particular type of scam, it is a good idea to leave the expensive restaurants or events out of the relationship until the relationship has seriously progressed.