Catphishing is a loveless Nightmare

/in /by

What is catphishing? This recently coined term refers to false online identities created by Internet scammers to deceive people into a long-term romantic or emotional relationship.

8DHow can you tell you’re being catphished?

  • Out of the blue, some really attractive person begins communicating with you online.
  • This individual finds excuses not to use their phone or Skype.
  • When push comes to shove on your end, this person will finally agree to visit you, but then some excuse will surface, preventing the visit.
  • You’ll find it impossible to get a legit physical address.
  • Phone calls will have dead silence in the background since they’re made with a lot of caution.

Catphishers use photos that really aren’t of them: sites showing off the most commonly used photos.

Catphishing isn’t always a romance-based scam. Someone may create a fake identity to catch a sex offender or set a trap for an unfaithful partner. These may seem like benign motivations, but a false identity can be created also to give the catphisher 15 minutes of cyberspace fame—at the expense of luring a public figure into the web of deceit.

Snagging Catphishers

This can be accomplished if more sites simply incorporated iovation’s device reputation checks for suspicious computer history and investigated for characteristics consistent with fraudulent use. With this they’d be able to deny catphishing criminals, often before the first time they try to sign up.

iovation has many more categories specific to dating, including bullying, account takeovers, underage members, and so on. What’s unique to their globally shared system is that their clients can choose what to take action on or not.

For example, a dating site may choose to be indifferent to cheating in online gaming sites, but set up rules to trigger multiple account creations looking for profile misrepresentation.  Dating sites can specify which type of behavior to protect their users from.

Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation. He is the author of 99 Things You Wish You Knew Before Your Mobile was Hacked! See him knock’em dead in this identity theft prevention video. Disclosures. For Roberts FREE ebook text- SECURE Your@emailaddress -to 411247