BEAUFORT COUNTY, S.C. (WSAV) Oh, the month centered around love… Some folks get to experience it every day, others are still on the hunt. While the internet opens up more opportunities to connect, it also exposes you to scammers who are after “love” and your money.
In Beaufort County alone, residents looking for love lost around 3 million dollars to cryptocurrency scams in 2024 – a large jump from previous years. With the rise of advanced AI and full-time scammers, Beaufort County officials are now warning singles in the county to be extra cautious about searching for love online.
“They're targeting anybody who is out in the social media realm…The ‘bad actors’ in these social circles are constantly scouring chat groups and social media to target lonely people,” said Eric Calendine, Beaufort County Sherrif’s International Affairs Investigator.
Calendine explained that scammers will do whatever it takes to get your money. They will usually operate off a script, starting with a conversation on social media. It’ll then move over to text apps like WhatsApp, and before you know it, they’re swapping “personal” photos to create a sense of connection.
“They're basically catfishing you to make you think you're talking to a real person. They send pictures of their family or their house, trying to get you more comfortable with them, and eventually, they'll lure you into a situation where they need money.”
And the photos they share with you are either someone else, or likely not real at all.
“What you'll see is they're using AI. They do a picture where they actually hold up a date, so it looks like that person. They’ll send a picture and it's a piece of paper that has a date on it and maybe their email or text address,” said Calendine. “Well, that could be computer generated easily. But that person believes all this. This person's real. They sent me a picture with a piece of paper as today's date and their email or phone number on it. And they believe that they're actually talking to that person.”
They might claim a loved one is sick, they're behind on rent, or they've run into work problems. Calendine explained these are all common tricks scammers use. He also shared other little giveaways that you may be in contact with a scammer.
“There's a lot of misspellings, or the words aren't typical English dictionary words in the context of the sense itself. Then you have that person who just seems to be so into everything that you do, like they’re almost trying to get all your personal details in that conversation.”
If you are curious about how to question if someone is trying to scam you, Calendine suggests looking deeper into who that person is.
“You can do a reverse image search through Google where you could take that picture, crop it, put it into reverse image search to see if it's been used before somewhere else.”
The biggest thing Beaufort County officials want folks to know is that scammers operate off your vulnerability.
“These people have a script, and they have a dialog they're going to have with you that is going to be compelling for that person to relate. So, they may say, ‘I'm praying for you’ or, you know, ‘we have the same interests’ and it's just going to be that startup of that conversation that that person can be so overwhelmed with, like this person gets me.”
But they also look to form relationships as fast as possible.
“They're trying to get your confidence built up so much that you believe this person's real, and you'll do anything for them. You know, a few weeks in, month into it, it’s going so well. We talk every day and they're targeting that, knowing that they're eventually going to set you up for that emergency situation where they're going to need some kind of financial assistance.
Calendine emphasized that it's hard to get your money back. If it's in gift cards, crypto or through electronic payment apps, it will most likely be impossible to see a return.
“If you give a gift card number to somebody, that stuff can disappear very quickly. Venmo, Zelle, and cryptocurrency, same thing. There have been successful operations to retrieve funds back, but it's very difficult in crypto tracing to get those funds.”