During the holiday season, people often open their wallets and hearts to others, but as an ex-romance scammer told CTVNews.ca, fraudsters know this and will take advantage of it.
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre reported victims of all scam types gave up $379 million in 2021, $165 million more than was lost the year before.
The total was representative of the entire year, but Christopher Maxwell, an ex-scam artist, told CTVNews.ca in an interview Wednesday the easiest time to take advantage of someone is during the last few weeks of December.
“Everyone wants to be with someone during the holidays,” he said.
Through his lived experiences of being a romance scam artist in Nigeria, preying on single, middle-aged women, he now reveals the tactics he used to embezzle upwards of $20,000, to help would-be victims avoid similar fates.
Now he is a recovered fraudster working with Social Catfish, a company dedicated to preventing online scams through reverse search technology, but Maxwell entered into the fraud world during university, at a time when many of his classmates were scamming people online.
“They have a lot of money in the bank account…they pay off lectures,” he said. “I am broke, I just want footwear.”
After buying an Android phone, Maxwell attempted to scam hundreds of women through a fake profile on Instagram.
“I’m gonna tell her I’m broke, I’m in Iran (or) South Korea deployment,” Maxwell said he would write to women online. “I want to move back…
