Coronavirus: Romance scams, the Yahoo boys and my friend Beth
By Zoe Kleinman Technology reporter, BBC NewsImage copyright Getty Images Image caption Scammers often pretend to be military men
You may well think you'd never fall for a romance scam, that they're cheesy, inauthentic and very obviously after your cash. But security experts have warned that there's been an increase in all sorts of online fraud during the coronavirus pandemic.
It happened to my friend Beth.
One day she mentioned that she had met a man online who was in the military. She thought it was a neat coincidence, because my partner is also in the armed forces. But the more she told me, the louder the alarm bells rang.
Despite being deployed on a "top secret mission" in a highly dangerous part of the world, "Alexander" managed to message Beth all the time. He was handsome, charming and affectionate.
When she showed me a photo, my heart sank. Alexander's uniform and rank didn't match the role he said he had or the unit he said he was in. There was no reason for him to be in the place where he claimed to be.
He was almost certainly not the man in the photo.
'He could be anyone, anywhere'
Telling Beth was hard. "It made me shake," she said.
"You start thinking this could be someone that you could have the chance to meet and see if there's any potential to see how it goes... then straight after that is the shock that you've been talking to someone who is not the person he ..
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