Conman uses Online Dating to Scam 15 women out of $360K

by Cheyenne Roundtree For Dailymail.com
A conman scammed hundreds of thousands of dollars out of 15 women after he posed as a billionaire businessman on big-name dating sites. John Edward Taylor stole up to $360,000 from several women across the United States after pretending to be a wealthy businessman and an oil tycoon, a FBI report claims. The 46-year-old allegedly would use dating sites such as eHarmony to trick women into relationships in order to steal their identities and gain access to their bank accounts.

John Edward Taylor, 46, scammed at least 15 women out hundreds of thousands of dollars, the FBI claims Taylor, who also went by Jay Taylor, was operating his scam for the past five years, according to the complaint filed in New York in June 2016, according to NBC New York.

When a woman - who Taylor charged $60,0000 to an American Express card in her name - confronted him, he threatened to send sexually explicit photos of the woman to her employer, the FBI said. Taylor allegedly wrote in a message: 'Have fun at [work]. I'm sending them all.' He had obtained his victim's social security number when he pretended that he wanted to order furniture for her so he could open a store credit account.

He would meet women from cities such as New York City and Atlanta through a host of online dating sites such as eHarmony, Match and Seeking Arrangement, the complaint stated. The conman would also trick his victims of their money by 'forgetting his wallet' at hotels or shelling out cash for expensive office rentals once they believed they were hired by him, NBC New York reported.

To another victim, Taylor allegedly said he was robbed at gunpoint and needed to use her credit card to buy things and spent $17,000.

Taylor was arrested at country club in Yardley, Pennsylvania and police believe he was living out of his car during the scams. He faces up to 30 years in prison for charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, aggravated identity theft, and threatening interstate communications.

FROM THIS SITE

Online Dating? Never Again

by Claudia Connell

Tempted by online dating? You won't be after reading CLAUDIA CONNELL'S hilarious (and cautionary) account

(U.K.) Single? Starting to despair of ever meeting Mr Wonderful? Well, don’t — because, ladies, the world is full of handsome, charming men with six-figure salaries, who are all queuing up to commit to ­people just like you.

The virtual world, that is, not the real world — don’t be daft: men like that were all snapped up years ago.

I’m talking about internet dating, of course, where millions of singletons (and quite a few marrieds on the make) line up to be selected and rejected in a process that has become ­Britain’s most popular way for couples to get together.

Over half of all single people turn to the internet in their search for love. Apparently, some of them find it. I never did and I’ve never met anyone it has worked for either. In the long-term, that is. A stream of endless dates is ­guaranteed. But lasting love? I’m not so sure.

It was 14 years ago, when I was 30, that I first tried online dating. I was single and not in bad nick, but working long hours in a female-­dominated environment meant I never got to meet anyone. Too young for the dinner party set, too old to be hanging out at nightclubs, it seemed like a hopeless cause until a friend of a similar age took me out and confessed her dirty little secret: she’d started to meet men online. She imparted this information in hushed tones, without making eye contact, and then, on pain of death, swore me to secrecy. I don’t think she could have been more ashamed if she’d confessed to drowning puppies.

Nowadays, the stigma surrounding internet dating has all but gone. So many people partake that it has became an acceptable way to meet the opposite sex.

But when I started it was a bit like train-spotting — you’d heard about it, you knew it went on, but the sort of people who did it were a little bit odd and not the type whose ­company you’d keep.

Today, there are hundreds of ­dating sites to choose from, catering for those with all sorts of criteria: ­vegetarians, Christians, single ­parents, sports fanatics, people who like pets. You name it, there’s a site where you can meet your perfect match who shares the same interest. But, 14 years ago, there were only a handful.

I browsed one site before signing up and handing over my money. I couldn’t believe my eyes when they matched me up with dozens of sexy, ­gorgeous hunks whose ­dazzling smiles beamed out at me from the screen.

Posing by their sports cars, keen to tell any prospective ladies that while they had two homes and earned a salary that could single-handedly pay off the national debt, they were still ­sensitive souls who liked to strum their guitars and do parachute jumps for charity.

They seemed too good to be true. They were.

After submitting my credit card details, the millionaire Brad Pitt lookalikes all mysteriously disappeared and no amount of searching ever uncovered them again.

They were, of course, plants, who were there to lure in naive punters. A man signing up for the first time (and I know this because I tried it) would have been greeted with ­pictures of ­Scarlett Johansson ­lookalikes, ­boasting about their ­cooking skills while posing in bikinis.

The first step when joining a dating site is to complete a profile. As I learned, this is a complete waste of time — especially for women. It doesn’t matter if you have climbed ­Everest in your lunch break and ­discovered a cure for cancer — no one will read it.

Some of the profiles are ludicrous. Match.com, the world’s biggest ­dating site, asks dozens of pointless questions that go on for pages and pages.

When I’m looking for a partner, there are certain things I’d like to know, but I don’t really care when he last went to the cinema or whether he likes biscuits.

I filled out my first profile questionnaire in painstaking detail. And, like everyone else online, I claimed to like travel, theatre and photography.

The truth is that I have hardly any hobbies or interests, but I’ve never yet seen a box I could tick that says: ‘Likes sitting in front of the TV, bitching about everyone on screen.’

One question some sites do ask is if you’d like to have children. What a mean trick. If you say ‘Yes’, you’ll come across as some baby-hungry bunny boiler, but say ‘No’ and you’re Cruella De Vil.

Any online dater will stand or fall on the strength of their photo.

And as the average person looks, well, average, they have to boost their chances of success by posting totally ­unrealistic images. So it was that on my first date, I found myself ­sitting opposite a very charming man called Patrick.

He’d claimed online he was 35. He certainly was 35, or thereabouts, in the picture he’d posted. But the man sitting opposite me was nudging 50. He had displayed a picture that was at least a decade old — one of the most popular online tricks.

I didn’t fare much better with the next guy. He looked nothing like his photograph — and there was a very good reason for that. It wasn’t him. It was just some ­random stranger whose image he’d scanned. When I questioned him about this, he snapped: ‘Well, I think we look alike.’

I must have had dates with six ­different men before I met someone I clicked with and who appeared to have been reasonably honest. We agreed to meet again and I went home to tell my flatmate, a ­fellow internet dater, that I had a good ­feeling about this one.

She replied cynically: ‘He’s ­probably back online now, lining up the next one.’ I checked his profile online — it was flashing, which meant that he was messaging someone else. She was right.

And that’s the huge stumbling block with internet dating: there’s too much choice.

There are on average seven women to every man, creating the kid in a sweet shop effect.

Why would a man give any woman a ­second chance when they know there’s six others online just ­waiting for his message?

If you’re a man, you can be as fussy as you want. Didn’t like her earlobes? Never mind. NEXT!

I also never made my peace with the fact I was looking for men via my computer. It felt a little bit grubby and, if I’m honest, desperate. Whenever I started to see someone on a regular basis, I could never bring myself to admit where I’d met him to my friends and ­colleagues. So I lied. They couldn’t believe my success in meeting men at the super-
market, the dry cleaners, on the bus, in the park. I even claimed to have met one man at the zoo. The zoo?! Why on earth did I think the idea of a childless woman cruising for men at the zoo was somehow less embarrassing than admitting the truth?

The longest relationship I had as a result of meeting on an internet dating site was seven months. ­During that whole time, I never went to his home; he always came to mine. He insisted this was because he had a flatmate and as I (by then) was living alone, we could have some privacy. It made sense, though I always had a niggling doubt. One day, my suspicions got the better of me. I searched the electoral roll and uncovered the real reason I never went to his home — his wife wouldn’t have liked it very much.

Of course, married men cheated before the internet came along, but online dating is like an adventure playground for philanderers.

Aged 34, I vowed to give up on internet dating for ever and take my chances in the real world. OK, I didn’t have a date every other night, but it was refreshing to meet people without having first to email each other for a week about our favourite films.

Then, a few years ago, I was lamenting my single status with a younger friend who suggested I join an online dating site. When I regaled her with my horror stories, she insisted that times had changed and I should give it another go. After nearly a decade away, she was right: things had changed. There were hundreds of sites to choose from, all with really ­positive, bouncy names that it must have taken marketing executives hours of brainstorming to come up with.

Names such as Soul Mates, Plenty More Fish, Love And Friends. I suppose Oddballs And Social ­Misfits is never going to attract too many customers, is it? The tedious questions were still there and all the men had user names such as Stud4U or Adonis82.

This time around I noticed that the pictures people had posted had taken a worrying turn.

WHO KNEW?

Around 4.7 million people visit dating websites each year in Britain — and one third of online daters admit to lying in their profile Rather than just smiling into the camera, all the men felt compelled to display images of themselves performing some Action Man-like task. Rock climbing and marathon running were particularly popular.

Meanwhile, the women have decided they must all be fun, feisty Sex And The City type gals and post pictures of themselves in little black dresses sipping brightly ­coloured cocktails with a ­coquettish look on their face. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t want to see pictures of men in their pants, picking their teeth with a takeaway menu. But surely a little bit of reality wouldn’t go amiss?

But no one on an internet dating site is ever allowed to be just an ordinary Joe (or Josephine). The impressive sounding ‘psychological and compatibility matching’ is something that’s become big in internet dating since my time away.

It’s particularly favoured by newcomers eHarmony, who vow that their unique formula will match you with your ideal partner. But given that no one online ever tells the truth, how is that going to work? You might as well match up Pollyanna with ­Hannibal Lecter. In the end, none of these changes mattered because I was breaking one of the cardinal sins of internet dating. I was over 40.

In my younger days, an average 70 men would look at my profile in a day. And that was before online dating was massively popular. Aged 42, I was lucky if I got two. Even men ten years older than me clearly stated in their profile that 39 was their cut-off age.

As I’ve already said, they could afford to be selective. If the same man tried to approach a girl in her 20s in the real world, he’d probably be sent packing but, online, well, he might just be in with a chance.

I quickly realised that when it comes to online dating, there are three age brackets: 18 to 29; 30 to 39; and 40 to 110. During my three months online, I didn’t go on a single date and the only interest I had was from men over 60. I did briefly flirt with the idea of signing up to a site that targeted the more mature dater, but something in me balked at the idea.

I am no spring chicken, but I’m not ready for a life of early-bird ­suppers and cosy nights in watching re-runs of Murder She Wrote. So I logged off and I haven’t looked back.

And unless I hear that George Clooney has joined Match.com and is looking to shack up with a ­British woman over 40 with ­absolutely no hobbies or interests, then I doubt I’ll be tempted back.


original article found here

Online Dating: Buyer Beware!

by Cassandra Pybus

(AUS) Even reputable internet dating sites are not immune from scammers trying to to take advantage of vulnerable people.

Last summer I went to a wedding celebration that was an unexpected delight, not the least for the bride who met her new husband on an internet dating site. Having just come to the painful terminus of a three-year affair, I could not suppress my wistful envy at her glowing happiness. The champagne flowed freely and several friends became bold enough to suggest that I should try internet dating. After all, what was to lose?

I failed to disclose that after my divorce in 2007, when I was living in the United States, I had signed up with the dating website e-harmony, but found shopping for intimacy such a humiliating experience that I aborted the process by changing my email address. I knew that it was easy to reactivate my membership - I needed to pay some money, revise my geographic location and supply a valid email. So I did as my friends had urged. What was to lose?

At first there was a flurry of e-harmony emails proposing likely matches for me, but when none of those men chose to contact me, silence followed. I had given the whole business away when, out of the blue, e-harmony sent me a very encouraging request for contact from Alan from Artarmon, a widower of 60. His profile said he was a consulting engineer, who appeared to be intelligent and well read, in addition to being a handsome man, if his photograph was to be trusted.

I felt a quickening excitement: I was lonely and sad and here was a successful, interesting man who liked what he saw in me. I stared at his email for a long time, thinking that someone with my life experiences was an unlikely choice for Alan from Artarmon and the message seemed rather generic, as if he had sent it to lots of women fishing to see who would respond.

I took a deep breath and cautiously typed a response to express my surprise and ask if he really meant to address me in particular. Expecting that would be the end of it, I went to bed at midnight, determined to put it out of my mind, which I never managed to do.

Next day I was doubly surprised to find Alan from Artarmon had replied in haste to assure me that he was much taken with my profile. He said he really liked that I was independent and was not tied to one place and promised to write at length after he had finished at work.

Blow me down, later that day there was another email telling me all about himself. His real name was Charles Carroll - his middle name was Alan - and he was a drilling engineer consultant with a postgraduate degree from the University of Queensland, who travelled overseas a lot and was currently working for a company in Reading, England. His wife had died a few years ago and there was an adolescent son in school in Malaysia.

It was a really long email, suggesting he had plenty of time to kill in his hotel room in Reading. He provided a lot of personal detail about his family background, his personal take on ethical behaviour and cultural interests that were highly compatible with my own.

Charles was clearly keen to impress upon me that he was the real deal, and not some flaky pervert; he even provided his personal email address so that we could communicate directly, rather than pay e-harmony for the privilege.

It was all very reassuring and I indulged myself in a little flurry of anticipation as I read and reread his message. But nagging at me was the bit about his son: wasn't he a bit too old to have a child in school, and why would he send his son to school in Malaysia?

Google can usually solve all such conundrums, but my cunning interrogation of the web was unable to find the consultant drilling engineer called Charles Carroll. It was only when his name was matched with a phrase from his message that Google found him, or rather located a copy of an email message from him that was almost identical to the one I had received, with a few variations such as a postgraduate degree from the University of Virginia. This email was sent to a woman living in America through a different internet dating site and was now posted on a website called romancescams.com.

A few hours of compulsive web searching revealed that the photograph I had seen on his profile was stolen from a male model named John Daniel, and that this image, paired with many different aliases, had been posted hundreds of times on internet dating sites, as well as Facebook.

In reality, the promising widower from Artarmon in Sydney was a room of electronically savvy youth in Lagos, Nigeria, who could just as readily be a woman named Emma, as circumstances required. The common scenario was that Charles, or Emma, worked for an international construction company, or an aid agency, and in the course of developing an intense online romance would be deployed in Africa, where a life-threatening drama would require a major injection of money.

The revulsion and shame I experienced at having been hooked, if not actually reeled in, by this scam was much worse than humiliation; I was swept by a wave of nausea.

But why have such a visceral reaction? Like anyone who uses email I am continually the target of scammers, but this was much more insidious because it was communicated to me by a respectable business that traded on being empathetic and trustworthy.

A letter from Mobuto's widow asking me to launder her husband's ill-gotten millions does not land in my inbox as legitimate communication from my credit union, nor does a begging letter from a young man orphaned by a war in Africa get forwarded by Save the Children.

Moreover, the mercenary or compassionate impulses that are triggered by these familiar scams come a very poor second to the powerful desire for intimate connection. This is what makes the online romance business a superb conduit for criminal activity.

According to the FBI, the romance scam is the work of very smart and very dangerous people who have connections to terrorism and who rake in billions of dollars with the tacit support of the online dating industry.

In Australia, online romance scams cheated men and women out of about $23 million last year, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, whose website carries the story of one man who paid his life savings of $200,000 to the orphanage that Emma claimed to have established in Africa. With that kind of money in play, scammers will take considerable time to cultivate strong feelings of intimacy and trust.

People who think themselves in love are highly vulnerable and will throw all caution to the wind to make romance tangible. It makes this a particularly cruel form of theft; one that leaves its victims doubly traumatised. I felt nauseous after the simple exchange of emails, so what was it like for a woman so deeply in love with Charles that when urgent medical treatments were needed to save his life she was willing to exhaust her savings and then take an extra mortgage on her house. Having paid a total of $95,000, she was suddenly unable to make contact. She lost her heart and she lost her house as well.

In February the ACCC issued best-practice guidelines for internet dating sites, advising they post prominent warnings and institute internal vetting procedures.

Yet six months later, a very respectable dating site actually directed me to a notorious scammer whose bogus identity should have been detected by digital security to identify the common heuristics of scam emails and the originating IP address.

There are still no prominent warnings on the home page of e-harmony or other reputable dating sites like RSVP that are known to be thoroughly infiltrated by scammers.

You would have to search deep into the dating advice section of these sites to stumble across advice that they might be used by unscrupulous people for criminal purposes. In such advice the onus of protection is placed squarely on you rather than the business that is charging money for every hopeful communication they encourage you to make.

In my particular case, e-harmony was very prompt to respond to my outraged complaint: they removed me from the site, as I requested, and refunded my money. They also sent a computer-generated message, which doubtless went to numerous other women, to say that they had removed Alan from Artarmon from their service and that ''privacy laws prohibit us from disclosing the specific reasons for our decision''.

I doubt that privacy laws pertain to an international criminal cartel operating out of Nigeria, and it's more likely that the lucrative internet dating business is reluctant to confess to a business model that regularly exposes its customers to serious criminal fraud. Despite the intervention of the ACCC, when it comes to shopping for intimacy, buyer beware.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE FOUND HERE

E-Harmony Date Ends up in Assault Charges

(even MORE reasons to STAY OFF online dating sites! They are packed with predators. - EOPC)

A Virginia (USA) man has been charged with sexually assaulting a woman he met on an online dating site, the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office says.

John Swann Evans, 34, is charged with abduction with intent to defile and forcible sodomy.

Police say Evans met a 37-year-old Loudoun County woman on the eHarmony online dating site in June.

In July, the two met at Evans' home, where he held her against her will and sexually assaulted her, police say.

Evans is currently being held without bond at the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center.

Investigators believe there may be other victims who have not come forward.

If you are a victim or know of someone who may be a victim, contact Investigator B. Ochsman of the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office Criminal Investigations Division at 703-777-0475.

original article here

major hat tip to OneofSeven

eHarmony Promoting Casual Sex Hookups

J.P. and Amanda Duffy expose dating service's encouragement of 'one-night stands'

..excerpts (Think Online Dating is "safe"? THINK AGAIN!)

Wednesday evening, a friend called expressing dismay about eHarmony's most recent e-newsletter which included an article, "Navigating the one-night stand." Our friend read the first few lines: "So you're a swinging single, and you've had a one-night stand. What's the etiquette for establishing boundaries, calling the day after and getting out without hurting feelings?"

Promoting such high-risk, promiscuous behavior is outrageous and irresponsible.

The advice column glosses over the risks of sexually transmitted diseases. In flippantly urging readers to "always use protection," the columnist ignores the ugly realties of "one night stands." The Center for Disease Control reports that sexually transmitted diseases are at epidemic proportions in this country, with 19 million new infections added every year. The consequences of an STD infection range from infertility to impaired reproductive health.

Also glossed over is the increased risk for violence among those who "navigate" multiple sexual partners. The article states, "It's true you can't spot an ax murderer just by talking to him, but it's a good sign if you are comfortable with someone in the light before deciding to dance in the dark." Does anyone really believe that "talking in the light" is enough to sufficiently reduce this high risk of dating violence?

What the column doesn't report is that sexually active females are five times more likely to be victimized by dating violence than girls who are abstinent.

Several years ago, Dr. Neil Clark Warren, founder of eHarmony, was closely associated with Focus on the Family. He separated from the organization after deciding to expand his services to the wider market. However, "Navigating the One Night Stand" takes this a step further by completely breaking eHarmony away from its Christian, pro-marriage beginnings.
After 24 hours, the article was removed from the eHarmony website. However, this will do little to undo the damage to their reputation. How did the advice column get there in the first place? It was clearly an intentional element of a well-designed newsletter, complete with a graphic of a tousled couple in bed together.

eHarmony can make amends by issuing a full retraction, an apology and an explanation of how this occurred. At minimum, this e-newsletter represents gross negligence. The apology should also be sent to all e-newsletter recipients.

eHarmony has assisted thousands of couples in building strong marriages. However, this goes beyond eHarmony's corporate reputation. A full retraction and reaffirmation of their mission will signal that eHarmony will remain an ally of millions of couples who endeavor to build strong marriages in the face of a culture that degrades marriage and family.

However, eHarmony's silence would signal something entirely different. A failure to retract will lead many to believe that eHarmony sees this as a minor issue and is open to "navigating" its readers into such risky territory again in the future.

Let's hope they realize that their standards should be compatible with the morals and values of their members.

SOURCE

Who wants to bet that eHarmony does it again? And other sites will or are doing the same! EOPC does not condone online dating or ANY online dating site in ANY way, shape or form.