We take a look at the alarming rise in internet scam activities inviting to travel to meet with organised criminals for meetings.
nline scams, also known as internet scams, continue to advance and can vary broadly. The term generally refers to someone using internet services or software to defraud or take advantage of victims, typically for financial gain.
Cybercriminals may contact potential victims through personal or work email accounts, social networking sites, dating apps, or other methods in attempts to obtain financial or other valuable personal information.
Many successful scams on the internet have similar endings: The victim loses their own money or fails to receive funds the cybercriminal promised. In worst-case scenarios, the victim might even lose their identity and their lives.
In this article, we will be focusing on the not often reported dangerous scam trend that is fast growing with so many people falling victim and losing their hard-earned money and resources and are too scared to report to authorities.
Travel to close Business Deal Scam
The scammers typically contact the person over the internet and offers the victim a huge amount of money either in form of a loan, investment, inheritance or a business deal and invites the victim to travel to meet with the scammers. Their typical popular travel destination includes Belgium, Spain, Turkey, Dubai, Netherland, Thailand or anywhere else where they have their organised criminal network.
In most instances, they'll ask the victim to come with some little amount of money, and in some cases with no money. The victim then travels to meet with the scammers hoping to meet with genuine people to close the business deal and walk away with the millions of dollars. That will never happen, as the victims are often kidnapped, tortured, dehumanized and forced to call family members to send money to free them. In other instances when they don’t get the amount of money they need, the victims are killed, and their organs harvested by these criminal elements.
In other variation of this scam, the victim will be shown a black magic money box and asked to go and get funds to use to clear the money but its all a hoax as they’ll most likely lose their life savings.
If you are involved in any business dealing on the internet promising you millions of dollars and you are advised to visit a foreign country to conclude the business, be warned that it could be a more dangerous scam that could ruin your life forever.
The first step you should take to protect yourself is to ask them to send you their verifiable office address where you will be meeting with them. If they are a genuine business entity, they should have an office address and should have no problems giving you their office address for the meeting. Make sure to inform them that you want to send a representative who lives in the same city to that address to verify and to confirm that they are who they claim they are before travelling to meet with them.
If they come up with non disclosure and confidentiality excuses, then know surely that you are dealing with the organised criminal scammers as that is the tactics they use to keep their victims from disclosing information that could blow their cover. If they are real, they'll have no problem accepting you to send somebody to come and verify if they are really who they claim they are to you online without disclosing the contents of the business to the third party. Insist that you want to send your representatives to simply verify they are real and genuine and that you are not disclosing the confidential details of the transaction to them. If they still have a problem with that, you need to block them immediately and stop any further contact with them as you are dealing with very dangerous organised criminals.
This type of scam is by far the most dangerous and deadliest of them all, victims are exposed to the risk of getting physically harmed, as well as losing their savings to these unscrupulous criminal elements. We advise anyone in such situation on the need to be very cautious and not to leave any stone unturned before embarking on such potentailly perilous journey that could destroy their lives forever.