She’s just not that into you, mate

Daniel Berehulak/Getty The many Internet scams that fool people never cease to amaze me. Consider the case reported by the Telegraph on Monday: An Australian sheep farmer who sought love over the internet was instead kidnapped and held hostage for 12 days after his African “bride” turned out to be a group of machete-wielding gangsters. ...

Daniel Berehulak/Getty

Daniel Berehulak/Getty

The many Internet scams that fool people never cease to amaze me. Consider the case reported by the Telegraph on Monday:

An Australian sheep farmer who sought love over the internet was instead kidnapped and held hostage for 12 days after his African “bride” turned out to be a group of machete-wielding gangsters.

The man, Des Gregor, flew to Mali to meet and marry his online lover “Natascha” (and accept his dowry of gold bars worth $85,000), only to be kidnapped by a group of men who demanded a £42,000 ransom from his family. Eventually, Australian police working with Malian forces foiled the scam. But it wasn’t actually the first time Gregor got caught up in this type of scam. Three years ago, he traveled to Russia to meet a different online lover. Nobody really knows what happened there, except that he didn’t return with a bride as intended.

A while ago, NBC’s Dateline aired a show called “To Catch an I.D. Thief,” in which the show tracked people around the United States as they fell for online “lovers” who easily manipulated them into helping out with various criminal schemes. The trail ultimately led to Benin (which borders Nigeria, land of many an e-mail fraud), though Dateline never really got to the bottom of the conspiracy. But what was particularly striking was the ease with which Internet lovers can convince their targets to do some remarkably stupid things. As Des Gregor now warns, before divulging your bank account details or catching a plane across the world to meet up with your online lover, “Make sure you check everything out 100 percent.” Sounds like good advice.

Prerna Mankad is a researcher at Foreign Policy.

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