“I am 90G military officer with the 1s infantry 62nd battalion army,” said one script obtained by The Times. There are also many willing teachers: In groups on Facebook and WhatsApp, they swap scripts for online chats with victims. In Nigeria, the scammers are aided by plentiful internet access and fluency in English. When The Times followed the trail of one scam, it led to Nigeria, where six men said in interviews that they swindled Westerners over the internet because it paid far more than honest work, which they said was hard to find. said many of the culprits are young men from Africa.

Officials from the United States military and the F.B.I.

In Africa: With terrorists moving south across the Sahel and threatening the coastal states of West Africa, the focus of the Pentagon’s annual Flintlock exercise was on helping participants see their broader role in counterterrorist actions.

Feeding the War Machine: The Pentagon’s deliveries of weapons to help Ukraine hold off Russia have exposed a worrisome lack of production capacity in the United States that has its roots in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Stripping Confederate Ties: In the first of nine scheduled redesignations aimed at purging the symbols of the Confederacy from the military, Fort Pickett in Virginia became Fort Barfoot in honor of Col.

When victims send funds, they often do so via wire transfers or iTunes and Amazon gift cards, which the scammers sell at a discount on the black market. Once they have a potential mark, the scammers shift the conversations with their victims to Google Hangouts or WhatsApp, messaging services owned by Google and Facebook, in case Facebook deletes their accounts.įor months or weeks, they try to seduce the women with sweet talk and promises of a future together. To find victims, they search Facebook groups for targets - often single women and widows - and then message hundreds, hoping to hook a few. Scammers steal photos from service members’ Facebook and Instagram profiles and use them to create impostor accounts. There is also a scheme where scammers pose as American service members to cheat vulnerable women out of their savings.

On Facebook and Instagram, there are lottery scams, celebrity impostors and even fake Mark Zuckerbergs.

What is whatsapp used for scamming