Russian Gal Seeking Comrade? No, It's an Internet Scam

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
Date: November 3, 2004 12:36:41 AM EST
To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>, Declan McCullagh 
<declan () well com>, CardinalFarley List 
<CardinalFarley () yahoogroups com>, OSINT Discussion Group 
<discuss-osint () yahoogroups com>
Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Russian Gal Seeking Comrade? No, It's an 
Internet Scam
Reply-To: johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com


From the New York Times --
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/03/international/europe/03love.html

Russian Gal Seeking Comrade? No, It's an Internet Scam
By C. J. CHIVERS

MOSCOW, Nov. 2 - As she sends e-mail with her photograph to men around 
the
world, Nadezhda Medvedeva calls to the lonely in just the right voice.

If circumstances were different she might make a fine wife. She is 
young,
brown-eyed and curvy, a pediatric dentist who quotes 19th-century poetry
and cooks delicious meals. She lives near the Caspian Sea in southern
Russia but is eager to travel. Her Russian is fluent; her English, not
bad.

Ms. Medvedeva is also cautious, even demure. It is only after she grows
comfortable with a suitor that she will reveal the depth of her longing.
Then nothing can hold her back.

"Hi, my Lion!" she wrote to Steven Rammer of Denver, Pa., as they 
planned
a passionate rendezvous at his home. "Hi, my soul!"

That rendezvous never happened. Nor did another she arranged for two 
days
later with George Palin, who waited in vain in Montana.

No matter how long the trail of the jilted, Nadezhda ("call me Nadia")
Medvedeva is neither a tease prone to second thoughts nor an overbooked
online tramp. She is not even a person. She is bait.

Ms. Medvedeva is one of scores, perhaps hundreds, of fictional 
characters
in a resurgent Internet hustle that has become a Russian boom industry
this year. Using fake names, forged visas and snapshots of young Russian
women, a new crop of on-line swindlers is luring Western victims into
highly successful confidence games.

Each is an escalating flirtation between an unsuspecting man and a 
Russian
grifter masquerading as a young woman. It typically ends when the victim
wires money to Russia to pay for visas and airfare for a consummation of
the affair. Then the beloved disappears.

The con first surfaced in 2001 but then subsided, Russian authorities 
say.
It has recently returned with vigor and new sophistication. The targets
are men in the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand
who have posted personal advertisements on the Internet.

The crime has become so widespread that the United States Embassy here 
is
receiving between 5 and 10 inquiries from American citizens about it 
every
day, an American diplomat said. "Some of these guys were literally left
waiting at the airport with roses," she said.

Most victims lose from $300 to a few thousand dollars, although one man
was defrauded of $11,000, the diplomat said. The number of men duped is 
at
least in the hundreds, but it may be much larger. "We only know about 
the
victims who are willing to talk about it," she said.

Modern Russia is in many ways an incubator for such crimes. It has a
highly literate population that suffers from low wages and soaring
unemployment, conditions that can breed hustlers. It offers them an
environment in which they can work, including uneven law enforcement and
barriers to outsiders - a language many find impenetrable, strict visa
rules and vast geographical spaces - that all but ensure that few fooled
Americans could ever find the people who tricked them.

Mr. Rammer and Mr. Palin both gave The New York Times the correspondence
they had received from the person pretending to be Ms. Medvedeva. The
string of e-mail messages provides an example of how the game works.

In June the correspondent sent an e-mail message to Mr. Rammer, replying
to a personal advertisement he had posted on match.com, an online dating
service.

It seemed a normal query, offering basic personal information - I'm 29, 
5
feet 6 inches tall, a dentist - and then following the rituals of new
acquaintance. Do you like your job? What is your favorite film?

A long-distance conversation began. More e-mail followed, each message
with an attached photograph.

The character of Ms. Medvedeva was slowly revealed. She is educated but 
of
limited means. She knows popular Western films and classical Russian
music. She provides dental care to orphans. She had a boyfriend, but he
beat her. Now she is alone.

As the exchange intensified the grifter accepted pictures from Mr. 
Rammer,
sent back compliments and answered questions he had posed. Two e-mail
messages included pictures of Ms. Medvedeva in a bikini.

On July 13 Ms. Medvedeva's character admitted it: she had fallen in 
love.
"In my soul, I feel contentment and joy when I think of you," she wrote.

Two days later the plot took its essential twist: her boss notified her
that she had a vacation due. She wanted to visit her new man. The July 
16
message began, in imperfect English, "I with trembling heart waited your
letter."

Then came the rub. Can you help with travel costs?

Anatoly Platonov, the spokesman for the K Department of Russia's 
Ministry
of Internal Affairs, which investigates Internet crimes, said that the
criminals who send these messages were almost always men and that they
used the same scripts to correspond with hundreds, even thousands, of
foreign men at once.

The person posing as Ms. Medvedeva was simultaneously flirting with Mr.
Palin, having found his personal advertisement on yahoo.com. He received
virtually identical e-mail, the only changes being his name and short
answers to questions he had posed in previous exchanges. ("I with
trembling heart waited your letter" arrived on July 27.)

To lead the men into the trap, the poser sent them e-mail about a 
nervous
wait for an American visa, and then a copy of the visa after it was
approved.

The visa was a forgery, made from a scan of an authentic visa, retouched
by computer to include a new face and personal data. A trace of its 
number
found that the original had been reported lost or stolen in August of 
last
year, the American diplomat said.

The ruse worked. Both Mr. Rammer and Mr. Palin wired Ms. Medvedeva money
to help with costs. Mr. Rammer sent $300; Mr. Palin $720.

The identity of the person who duped them remains unknown, although
whoever it was has been active: Ms. Medvedeva is listed as a phony
bride-to-be on Internet blacklists, which are regularly updated by 
bilked
men. Her picture has also been used under the name Tatyana Kuzminyh and
Anna Kruglova.

Mr. Platonov said Ms. Medvedeva's ever changing character fit a type. 
The
fictional women are like Legos, assembled by joining random photographs,
vignettes and seductive scripts. The men who create them often have 
female
accomplices who provide their passports for scanning or pick up money at
Western Union counters or banks.

The first ring the authorities broke up, in 2002, consisted of two young
men and a woman who sent e-mail from the city of Yoshkar-Ola, in the 
Ural
Mountains. "We arrested the fat girl and she gave evidence," Mr. 
Platonov
said, referring to the woman in the group. "It turned out that all this
effort was organized by a 21-year-old boy."

In the most recent case, prosecuted this year, a husband-and-wife team 
in
Chelyabinsk bilked foreign men out of several hundred thousand dollars,
Mr. Platonov said. The wife posed as the bait. The man was found guilty 
of
fraud, but his case is on appeal, a spokesman at the local Internal
Affairs office said.

The American diplomat says the swindle appears to have been picked up by
copycats who have grown more sophisticated of late.

The scripts have become more patient and include story lines that show a
character's honesty or kindness. (Ms. Medvedeva described treating an
orphan's toothache during a blackout - by flashlight.) The visa 
forgeries
have also become more convincing.

Moreover, some swindlers have created Web sites that purport to 
represent
travel agencies and back them up with "employees" who take calls from
foreign men asking about their date's airfare and reservations. Others
have turned to new classes of victims.

Three weeks ago, the diplomat said, the first gay victims began to
complain.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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    "When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra
    "Always make new mistakes" -- Esther Dyson
    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from 
magic"
     -- Arthur C. Clarke
     "You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004 RIP)

                           John F. McMullen
    johnmac () acm org johnmac () computer org johnmac () m-net arbornet org
                   johnmac () tmail com johnmac () echonyc com
            jmcmullen () monroecollege edu johnmac () alumni iona edu
               ICQ: 4368412 Skype, AIM & Yahoo Messenger: johnmac13
                   http://www.westnet.com/~observer


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