With the elevated use of social media, the variety of on-line scams has additionally elevated dramatically. Recently, a 65-year-old Japanese lady was duped on-line by a fraudster posing as a Russian astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS).
The lady turned sceptical of the massive sum of money he requested her to switch to him. The fraudster had requested the lady to pay for his journey to return to earth and had promised to marry her after his return.
The two met on Instagram in June this yr. The fraudster had uploaded random photos of house and claimed that he labored on the International Space Station the place astronauts have restricted entry to cellphones.
Their relationship grew fairly intense very quickly. He repeatedly expressed his love for her and proposed marriage on LINE, a Japanese messaging app. He reportedly wrote to her, “I want to start my life in Japan,” and “Saying this 1,000 times won’t be enough, but I’ll keep saying it.” “I love you.”
But, he defined, he wanted cash to return to Earth with a purpose to marry her. He defined that there have been touchdown charges to pay in Japan in addition to the price of a rocket to fly to the nation.
The lady paid him 4.4 million yen which is about $30,000 and about 24 lakh INR in 5 instalments from August 19 to September 5, believing him to be her future fiancé, in response to the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.
However, quickly the lady grew suspicious of the ‘astronaut’ who would repeatedly press her to ship cash. The lady later filed a police criticism and the matter is underneath investigation.
As per Asahi TV, a Japanese media outlet, Another Japanese lady in her forties was adopted by an Instagram deal with claiming to be a Russian astronaut on the International Space Station.
For the subsequent two days, the 2 communicated through the app’s direct messages function, with the astronaut doubtless utilizing software program to translate messages into Russian and the lady conversing in Japanese, in response to the report by Asahi.
The “astronaut” then sought that the dialog be moved to a different app, which made the lady suspicious. The lady, nevertheless, determined to not proceed the dialog.
It’s additionally potential that there are a lot of extra circumstances like this that haven’t been reported to the police. Japanese police don’t maintain separate information of romance scams like this one, however there has reportedly been a major improve in on-line scams during the last decade.