How to catch a romance scammer. a simple step by step guide
Introduction
This was a simple research project I did to help my friend identify if the romantic interest on Tinder she had was real or a scammer. Welp, it turned out he was a scammer.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the process of identifying a romance scammer and how you can avoid becoming their next victim using a simple less technical social engineering method. The importance of delivery in achieving a high success rate cannot be overstated.
First off, let’s talk about what a romance scammer is: A person who pretends to be in love with you in order to swindle money out of you. They do this by gaining your trust and then taking advantage of your emotions. These scammers are usually quite convincing and can even appear very genuine at times—they may even know personal details about you!
So how do you know if someone is a romance scammer? Here are some signs:
-They ask for money right away and refuse any other form of payment (for example Paypal, Bitcoin, Giftcards, western union, etc)
-They ask for money for emergencies that don’t seem urgent (for example hospital bills, inheritance, Clearance fees, etc)
-They ask for money after only knowing them for a few days or weeks at most.
How to catch a romance scammer
Grabify is a website that lets you send decoy email links to scammers, which will then record the IP address and the device information of the scammer’s computer or phone.
You can sign up for free on the grabify website. Once you’ve signed up, go to your account and click on “New Link.” You’ll need to enter a name for your link and then enter the website address you want to hook with the logger and click “Create Url.”
After setting up a link, give it to your scammer by sending them an email using one of their fake emails or Facebook messenger accounts. Let them know this is an important link they should check right away!
To make this attack work, we’ll need to set up a bait in which clicking or tapping a link makes sense for the victim. Grabify makes it easy for you to set up decoy links, which is what we’ll be using as our “catch me if you can” bait for the scammer’s hook. All you have to do is go onto their website and create a phishing link.
Here are the important things to note :
- Your new URL. This usually looks like “https://grabify.link/ABC12A”. This is the hooked URL and this would be what you’d be sending the “catfish” or friend. It’s advisable to change the domain to something else, so your victim doesn’t get to know it’s a grabify link cos of its popularity.
- Your tracking code. This is the code for tracking and to get to your logs, you’d type this in.
- Your access link. By accessing this link directly, you can view your logs. This will save you the trouble of having to go back to the homepage every time you want to check your logs. You might want to have a look at that as well.
- Smart Logger Feature. This is a new feature recently introduced by grabify to give additional information about your victims. Such information includes your target’s device orientation, its charging state, battery percentage, his/her device’s GPU if he/she is accessing the link over a Tor exit node if they’re accessing over VPN, and a whole lot of cool info. You might want to turn it on.
This is probably the most important stage of the whole process, delivering the link successfully to the target without them suspecting, here I will suggest a couple of ways you can go about this.
As you may have already been in contact via chat on tinder, WhatsApp, or iMessage, getting them to click the link shouldn’t be a hassle. You can do that by uploading some pictures on dropbox or google drive, then sending the link to Grabify to insert the logger. Send a message to the suspected scammer as follows,
“Hey handsome, I’m not so comfortable having my nudes shared, so here is a private link that expires 2Hours for your viewing pleasure. ”
Alternatively, you can contact the scammer and tell him I have some money for him, but only if he could help you win a contest. He can never suspect anything because it will look like a legitimate website. Once you have found the right words to say to make them visit the link, you are in control.
The final step is to check your account to view the result
This will mean that someone opened your link and you can see their IP address on the Grabify webpage. You can then use an IP tracker website to find out where they are located geographically based on their IP address.
For the final step, you need to check your grabify account on their website and see if you have any logs of clicks. This will mean that someone opened your link and you can see their IP address on the grabify webpage. You can then use an IP tracker website to find out where they are located geographically based on their IP address.
If there is an activity in your account, you should be able to ask them questions about it if they deny being involved with romance scams or give an excuse for why, but this is unlikely because scammers rarely admit fault unless pressed hard enough so don’t expect them to do so without a fight!
Why Ip address?
Consider it as a one-of-a-kind ID or number provided to each and every internet user to assist them to be identified. This unique number, in turn, aids in determining various details about the bearer, one of which is the bearer’s approximate location.
Because the position provided can be altered by a number of circumstances and may not be precise, special emphasis was placed on the word “approximate” above. However, you’re usually not far from the place you’ve been given.
Conclusion
It is quite a simple procedure and can be done by anyone. I hope this article helps you to identify if you are in contact with a romance scammer. It turned out my friend did have a romance scammer on her hands and he was trying to get her to send him money to help pay for his sick mother.
