WBRC : On Your Side Investigators: Crooks stealing military ID's to commit online romance scams

LTC Stephen F. Not Surprising and Rather Easy to do.

Extremely easy to do and hard to catch. All you have to do is go to someone's profile, right click on their picks and save them, then get a secondary email address and create a new account with that email address, your pictures and name.

These scams typically originate overseas, mostly in Africa, so there is very little that can be done to track them down and punish them.

Although I had my doubts about him, the main reason I continued to communicate (for 5 months) with the alleged military member that I was scammed by on Facebook, was because the scammer had 100s of different photos of this member of the military, photos that were taken inside military camp grounds, with other military members etc. I kept thinking, he's gotta be legit - because how could a fraud have all these photos of this man? There were also plenty of photos of this man during his R&R/liberty. It's absolutely reprehensible that these international scammers are able to get away with this. If I could I would program drones specifically to track down these scammers & shoot them in their nether regions! But that's just because I'm bitter at having wasted so many months writing to someone who ended up being a figment of my imagination!

I find them all the time. It's sad, but there are many that get taken in by these guys SPC Douglas Bolton.

Yup, been there... done that, bought the Tshirt! They are the worst case of stolen valor out there! Problem is there's very little that is done to crack down on their deceitfulness!

The main reason that there is very little that can be done is that most originate from outside the US. Outside the US makes investigating and prosecuting these scams next to impossible.

So last year I fell for a man who had befriended me on Facebook, & claimed to be a MSgt deployed to Kabul at an international peace keeping camp. Even though I had my suspicions from the outset, he had so many photos of the military member, therefore I continued to go with his story.

However after months of communication on Facebook, he asked me to help him with a parcel containing his military identification papers & some of his personal effects, that he wanted to send to me to keep safe until his soon to be discharge. I questioned him extensively about why he would want to part with & send me his personal effects when we hadn't even met in person. His lame excuse was that I was the only person he knew he could trust, and that he was in an international military camp where no one around him was to be trusted, not even his own men nor his Commander.

A few days later, I was contacted by some one claiming to be an International Red Cross representative who was given the supposed "parcel" to send to me from London. This representative apparently used some international shipping company to send the parcel & that company was now requesting that I send $1800 USD to ensure the safe delivery of the parcel! They even had a Wells Fargo account with some unknown person's name on it, for me to deposit the funds into. I know right?! Crazy!!! I reported this fraudulent military profile on Facebook & his profile was taken down immediately. Problem is I wonder how many other vulnerable females fell for this imposter? There are sites where one can report these military imposters & scammers, however these manipulative cowards operate outside of the USA thus making tracking there activities difficult. One such site is http://www.cid.army.mil/romancescam.html