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The Philippine National Police Anti-Cybercrime Group (PNP-ACG) told people to be wary of love scams and investment scams with Valentine’s Day approaching.

In a radio interview, Anti-Cybercrime Group cyber response unit chief Col. Jay Guillermo explained that in a love scam, the suspect finds victims online by chatting with them on social media or dating applications and then asking them for money once they fall in love with them.

Guillermo said most victims were women, especially before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This doesn’t only happen in February. This scam doesn’t just happen on a certain month because the relationship (of the suspect and the victim) will reach about a year before he asks for money or makes promises to make the Filipina fall in love with him,” Guillermo said.

“Through one suspect, he does not only court one woman online. That means it can be either 10 or 20 women even. What he does in his room the whole day is to look for someone to befriend online. So for example, in one month, he has 30 relationships, then he could get money from them every day if he scams all of them in a year,” he added.

He said this kind of scam is not organized but mostly done by Nigerians who have Filipina wives.

“They are not organized but it is a group composed mostly of Nigerian nationals who married Filipinas, who they use as mules to open bank accounts so that when they get a victim, the money gets transferred to those bank accounts,” Guillermo said.

Guillermo also warned the public against investment scams that use a similar modus, where they would create websites for different investment schemes to attract victims who would become their investors.

He added that these suspects would set up websites to make their investment schemes look credible and would convince their victims to invest more money each month and when the victim could not give any more money the websites would shut down.

Guillermo said the police have caught four suspects of love scams in the past year and filed a case against them. They are still waiting for a warrant of arrest to be issued. Jaspearl Tan/DMS