How to spot an online romance scam

By  Tebby Otieno

Contributor

What you need to know:

• Women seeking companionship online are increasingly exposed to fraud, exploitation and gender-based violence.
• Experts say stronger reporting, digital literacy and survivor support are needed to tackle online dating abuse.

She had never told anyone she was dating a mzungu. Now she was explaining to relatives, her church pastor and friends why a parcel she had bragged about was never coming.

Joyce* had joined an online dating platform chasing a version of love she had only ever watched on soap operas: a rich, smart white man, a new family abroad, a life far from where she was. For a month, it looked as though she had found it. A man matching everything she wanted began chatting with her, and the romance felt close enough to touch.

"I met with someone on a dating App, we started talking, and then he sent me photos, and he told me that was him. He was a very handsome mzungu (Caucasian) man. In that photo, he was inside a car. We continued talking; he would send me photos telling me that was him from the shop, when he was in the office, from work and when doing different things. He used to tell me that he had divorced his wife but had a daughter who he used to live with," Joyce says.

A month in, he told her he had bought her gifts and promised to send them to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, where she would collect them. "He sent me photos of a MacBook and iPhone that were on his bed, then told me that he had put 80 dollars inside that MacBook and that he wanted to send them to me. I was so excited because those things are such a big deal."

He asked for her phone number and email address, and she gave them without hesitation. The next day, he sent her a photo of a box already at the airport, her name and email printed on it. "I said, wow! This thing is becoming a reality," she recalls.

Then came his final instruction: he was flying out to another country and would be unreachable the next morning, just as she was due to collect her parcel. "I wished him a safe journey although I did not ask him where he was going. Back at my house, I did not sleep that night; I called my sister and told her that I needed her to accompany me to the airport the following morning to pick up a parcel. I even started asking her how much Kenya shillings we would get from the 80 dollars that I had been told was being sent to me. We did convert them via phone conversation, and we were so happy."

The next morning, before she left for the airport, a call changed everything. "Hi, how are you?' I said yes. 'I am calling from Mombasa to tell you that your parcel is here, but it cannot come to Nairobi because it is heavy. It needs nine dollars.' Then I asked him, 'nine dollars?' He had an American accent, so I was really struggling to understand what he was saying. He then handed the phone to another person who then started to speak with me in Kiswahili with the coastal accent. The message was the same: I was to send nine dollars before my parcel could be delivered at the airport in Nairobi," Joyce recalls.

Confused, she checked with people she knew who had received parcels from abroad before sending any money. "That is when I started doubting. That person called me again, but I told him that I did not have dollars to send to him. When I asked the man who had sent me the gifts about being asked to send some money before I could receive my parcel, he told me to just give whatever money I was being asked. It dawned on me that I was being conned, so I blocked the caller and the account we had been chatting on."

Blocking him was the easy part. Living with what had happened was harder. "I had never told anyone that I was dating a mzungu, but now I had to start telling my relatives, church pastor and friends about him because of that parcel. It was very difficult for me to mention that a mzungu man I was dating online was conning me! Deep down in my heart, I knew that I had already found a good man. He was good-looking and rich according to the photos of the things he used to send to me, like the car he used to drive, the house he used to live in and the office where he used to work. I was also expecting him to come to Kenya one day."

Joyce believes that, had that month's romance played out as it began, her life would look very different today. 

"As we are talking, I would have already given birth to three wazungu children, driving my own car on the streets of San Francisco with my babies sitting in the back seats while my husband is in the co-driver seat. But this life, I am still here in Mathare slums."

Asked why she still wants a mzungu man, her answer reveals how much she still carries that dream. "When I was with that mzungu, I felt like I had companionship; I felt so good whenever I spoke with him. I have not given up. I am so sure; I will get another good mzungu man who will marry me and take me to Germany. I have faith."

She has also concluded that the distance between her and the man she thought she knew is what made her vulnerable. "If we had met in person, there could have been some trust in knowing whether he was real, because I could have even met someone who knew him, and that would have made me feel more confident talking with him. Sometimes I feel that he was the same person who still asked me for money but pretended to have been in another country."

Joyce is not the only one.

Angel's story

Angel* signed up for a different dating platform, paying Sh2,000 after friends told her it had rich men looking for Kenyan women. A man with a West African accent started chatting with her, and his profile photo, showing expensive clothes, accessories and a watch, suggested he was handsome and wealthy.

"He did chat with me, and we exchanged phone numbers and started calling each other offline. He asked me, 'Can you visit me? I live in Kahawa West.' I told him to send me fare, and he sent me Sh1,000. He had told me that he sells gold, so he told me that if I visited him, he would give me Sh10,000. I told myself he looked like a good guy, so I went.”

The man she met in person bore little resemblance to the one she had been chatting with online, and as the Nairobi saying goes, "vitu kwa ground ni different (things are different on the ground).”

"I had hoped that he would come driving a big car, but the first red flag I saw was that he came driving a very old car, but I said, let me just get inside. His physical appearance was very different from the one I saw online. In the App he looked smart, had ‘bling bling’, that made him look like this rich, handsome African man, but in person, he was a very old, ugly man," she says.

Still hoping for the Sh10,000, she got into his car, and he drove her to his flat. "He lived very far from the main road. When I alighted, I looked around, but he shouted at me, asking, 'What are you checking? Let's go up.' Entering inside, it was a very dirty house; clothes were all over. He asked me whether I wanted a drink, but I feared that he could drug me, so I said water, which he served me."

She did not stay long before he made advances, and afraid of being harmed, she went along with it. "We got intimate, but he refused to use protection. As he escorted me outside his house, I asked him where the Sh10,000 was. He told me that he had dollars, so we were to drive to a bureau in Westlands, where he was going to convert them and then give me Kenyan shillings.”

That drive ended back where it had started. "He asked me to alight and take a back seat so that his friend could sit where I was sitting. Immediately, I alighted, the guy sped off. I was stranded, and it was at night. It was so traumatising. The following morning, I went to the health facility and explained what had happened to me. I was given some medication to protect me from possible infections like HIV, STIs and pregnancy, which I took for 21 days."

She had no idea, she says, that she could have reported him to the police. "When I went to his house, I had about Sh800 in notes in my purse, but after he sped off and I got into a matatu, I noticed that there was only a Sh50 note. I tried to call him, but my calls could not go through."

A protection gap, and women pay the price

Yvonne Anyango Oyieke, a legal scholar and founder of Akoma Research and Consulting, says dating apps like the ones Joyce and Angel used have widened the door to exploitation and abuse, with younger women and children bearing the brunt of it because of their vulnerability. It is a pattern that runs through this story: the predators change, but the targets, overwhelmingly, are women.

"The challenge, however, is that there is no one law that comprehensively covers technology-facilitated gender-based violence in its various forms, but there are different pieces of laws that give certain prohibitions and offer protection where your rights are violated," Yvonne tellsthe Nation.

She points to the Data Protection Act and the Computer Misuse Act as protections for people abused online, while the Sexual Offences Act applies when the abuse moves offline, as it did for Angel.

"The Computer Misuse Act outlines various prohibitions on when a person engages in financial crimes and also crimes that can be considered exploitative, and sexual and gender-based violence. Just because I agreed to meet with you based on our engagement on an online platform doesn't mean that there is a blanket consent to whatever goes on when I am with you physically. If you are together physically, then that is where the Sexual Offences Act would come into play if someone assaults you or rapes you."

Proving a crime, she adds, takes specific evidence and can be costly, which discourages many survivors from reporting, and in turn leaves few statistics on dating app predators. "You can imagine that dating is a very personal and intimate thing that is not generally in the public realm. It becomes very difficult to share that sort of information, and in terms of the dating platforms, even though they have responsibilities and duties that are dealing with very personal data under the Data Protection Act, they would not want to share that sort of information."

Silence, she warns, only protects the predators. "For you to solve a problem, you have to name it. Tech is evolving so quickly; these privacy walls that we have from dating Apps, and also based on a certain level of shame or stigma that comes and the idea that you took yourself there, you are the one who signed up on a dating App, you met someone online and then you decided to go and meet them, only make it hard for survivors to report. The shame needs to sit with the perpetrator, not the other way round," Yvonne tells Nation.

The apps themselves are not the problem, she says, but predators exploit them, which is why reporting matters. 

"We still need to engage with the police because, as a criminal matter, they are still the first people to report to, and they are the ones who, based on the facts that you give them, report to the office of the Director of Public Prosecution on behalf of the state, because it is a crime against the state.

"Now, depending on which provision of the law, they will be able to take that forward and be able to determine which particular charge they would record. Also report to the health provider, who would also give you the support that you need, whether it is emotional or physical, because it is also something quite traumatic. Following a matter in court is expensive, and it can take a lot of time, and it depends on your resources, but you can also file a civil claim against someone who violates your rights," Yvonne explains.

A market built on emotion

Online dating is not new. Digital experts trace the industry back to kiss.com, launched in 1994, and Match.com, which followed in 1995. Today, there are more than 8,000 social dating apps worldwide, with Bumble the highest-earning by revenue. Regulating them, though, is another matter.

"Something that people should understand is that these online dating Apps were generally created for business, so when you are bringing emotions into business that doesn't work. The owners are looking for money while the user is looking for love. That is why it is kind of hard to regulate them, because they are business oriented and they have specific principles on how they work," says Neema Mujesia, communications adviser at KICTANet.

A recent KICTANet survey, Unmasking Trolls Online, found that people using dating apps often move between online and offline interactions, and back again.

"Online dating comes with fake profiling, with perpetrators able to recreate an identity similar to who they want to be. Through that, they are able to take exact steps, monitor credibility, and then they start getting into intimacy conversations. Building a parody account is not a sophisticated system. It is just about having the right tools, which are a smartphone, data bundles and continuous monitoring. Actually, to some people it is a career they are building."

Meeting online removes the everyday cues people use to size someone up, cues a physical meeting would offer. 

"When meeting somebody in person, you can tell at least a few features about them. If they are lying about something, you might see maybe a flicker of the eye, shaking of the voice, maybe they are fumbling, and also if it is a relatable ceremony, you can be able to see who he interacts with and say you are safe. That is not the case with the online dating App," she warns.

People turn to dating apps for long-term partners, hook-ups, a wider pool of potential partners nearby, others who share their sexual orientation, and sometimes simply a confidence boost, Neema adds. But the same technology that connects them makes impersonation easy.

"The challenge is that technology makes it very easy to reproduce someone's identity at scale. A photograph, name and a few details from a public profile can be enough to create an account that looks credible. That is why digital literacy has to go beyond knowing how to use a platform. People need to know how to assess who they are interacting with online," she says.

Why the trap works

Counselling psychologist Annabell Watiri Gichure explains that isolation raises the emotional stakes of any connection, which is exactly what makes app-based intimacy so effective on lonely users.

"When someone lacks regular social contact, attention from one person can become disproportionately important. A message saying 'I was thinking about you' can carry much more emotional weight when the person has few other sources of connection. Over time, the relationship can become connection, comfort, emotional dependence and then reduced scepticism."

Gradually, she says, an isolated person may come to rely on the relationship to manage loneliness, anxiety or sadness, making it harder to step back and question inconsistencies. "Importantly, isolation doesn't mean someone is weak. Humans are social beings. When connection is scarce, the brain naturally places greater value on sources of connection."

She also points to love-bombing, an unusually intense level of affection, attention, praise, promises or contact, often very early in a relationship, which can trigger accelerated attachment, emotional highs, lowered scepticism, idealisation and dependency.

"The person may become emotionally attached much faster than they normally would. Constant attention and affection can create excitement and a strong sense of being special or chosen. Once someone feels emotionally invested, they may interpret warning signs more generously. The person may begin to see the relationship through the lens of 'This is exactly what I've been looking for.'"

Patterns of intense affection followed by withdrawal, anxiety and renewed affection, she warns, should be read as intermittent manipulation, not romance.

"If the intense attention later becomes inconsistent, the person may chase the earlier version of the relationship. The important distinction is that healthy affection isn't automatically love-bombing. The concern is the combination of unusually rapid intensity, pressure, idealisation, boundary violations and/or manipulation, especially when the person's behaviour doesn't match their words over time," Annabell tells the Nation.

Recognising the pattern is one thing; reporting it is another, and Neema says the system for doing so is improving, however slowly.

"The DCI Crime Unit now has a hotline, which is anonymous reporting, which is very important because sometimes you find the victim does not want the identity to be known. Now, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, when you report, takes your case into court, and they give you feedback within 90 days. That is a mechanism which we can say has been put in place, and there are so many fines that people are getting in light of data breaches, which necessarily means without consent," she says.

Need help? Call these numbers:

• DCI toll-free hotline, anonymous reporting: 0800 722 203
• Police hotline: 999, 911 or 112