Hello and thank you for your question, which I will be happy to assist you with. Please let me know what has happened so far?

It is unfortunately never possible to state with certainty whether someone is genuine or not unless you have actually met them in person and have built up a certain degree of trust that way. That is because scammers frequently change their names and identities and it is impossible to keep track that way. However, so called ‘romance scams’ are very common and rely on the good nature of innocent victims to make a significant income.

The main ways to identify such scams is not by tracing the person, which would often be impossible, but by looking at the overall situation and identifying certain red flags or other known hallmarks. The most common ones are:

1. You have met this person online, usually through a dating website, social networking service or instant messaging.
2. They will usually be located in a different country to you, most commonly in Africa or Eastern Europe.
3. They will ‘trick’ you into developing feelings for them. They may have struck a long-distance relationship with you, they are very pleasant and romantic, some even fall in love straight away and are ready for marriage. They may take time to gain your trust, although often the relationship progresses unnaturally fast.
4. They may use a photo of another person. This may not always be the case though and they may use their own photo or that of accomplices. You can actually try and trace the photo to see if it has been used elsewhere by using Google’s ‘Search by Image’ facility: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searchbyimage.html
5. They eventually go for the kill and ask for money. There are various reasons, which usually include: money for travel tickets and visas, medical treatment, help with living expenses, etc. A very comprehensive list of previously used reasons can be found here: http://romancescams.org/TypesOfScams.html. However, the golden rule is that if a stranger that you have originally met online asks you for money, alarm bells should be ringing straight away.
6. They request that the payment is made via some dubious money transfer method, with little or no fraud protection, such as Western Union, Moneygram, etc.

If the above looks familiar, chances are that the person you are involved with is a fraudster and you need to proceed with extreme caution. I strongly suggest you follow these steps:

1. First of all, cease all contact with the person
2. Do not send any money. If you have already sent some – try to see if you can cancel the transfer

If you wish to report this as a potential scam, you can do so in a number of ways:

• You can report any scam to the Federal Trade Commission by email: spam@uce.gov
• If you have already sent money, contact your local State Attorney General
• If the scam originated through the internet, or is in some way connected to the internet, submit a complaint to the Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) by following this link: http://www.ic3.gov/complaint/default.aspx