We've all heard of dating scams, but realizing that most of them are part of larger criminal organizations working 24/7 to manipulate and defraud you can be a bit shocking. Today's guest is Jane Lee. Jane is a Trust and Safety Architect at Sift who specializes in malicious websites, spam, misinformation, account content abuse, and payment risk. Prior to joining Sift, she was on the fraud teams at Facebook and Square and also spent some time as a private investigator.

Show Notes:

• [1:08] - Part of Jane's responsibility at Sift is to understand new and emerging fraud trends.
• [2:36] - Jane gets to do the detective work she likes but in a more physically safe tech environment.
• [3:46] - Pig butchering scams are similar to romance scams but more advanced.
• [4:25] - Scammers start on dating apps and move targets to another form of messaging.
• [6:36] - It's called pig butchering by the scammers.
• [7:34] - As a dating app user, Jane noticed patterns and decided to investigate.
• [9:29] - Jane shares the trends in the profile photos and images on dating accounts.
• [11:58] - Over time, it is easy to see patterns in profiles.
• [13:55] - Using IP emulators is common for scammers.
• [15:47] - Machines are better at detecting patterns than the naked human eye.
• [17:26] - Fraud is largely agnostic.
• [18:58] - It is the same dance but with different "flavors".
• [20:49] - Moving over to another messaging system is one red flag. After that, love-bombing is another common indicator.
• [23:07] - Covid has given scammers another reasonable excuse for them to use about not being able to meet in person.
• [24:22] - These types of scammers also talk about investments and even screenshots of bank accounts.
• [26:46] - To compensate for grammar and language errors, these scammers will mention that they were born overseas.
• [28:50] - These scammers also may have a fake crypto exchange platform.
• [30:22] - Jane describes the experience of interacting with the "tech help" line of a fake crypto platform.
• [35:27] - Jane shares that a lot of these scammers are coming out of Southeast Asia.
• [36:34] - There is a very sophisticated fraud economy.
• [39:35] - Deep fake technology is getting more and more advanced.
• [42:15] - What is synthetic identity fraud?
• [43:55] - It is necessary to have a little less trust in people you talk to online.

Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review.

Links and Resources:

• Podcast Web Page
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• Sift Website
• Sift Fraud Alert: Pig Butchering Blog Post