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International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment

DIMVA 2015: Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment pp 216–236Cite as

Quit Playing Games with My Heart: Understanding Online Dating Scams

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9148))

Abstract

Online dating sites are experiencing a rise in popularity, with one in five relationships in the United States starting on one of these sites. Online dating sites provide a valuable platform not only for single people trying to meet a life partner, but also for cybercriminals, who see in people looking for love easy victims for scams. Such scams span from schemes similar to traditional advertisement of illicit services or goods (i.e., spam) to advanced schemes, in which the victim starts a long-distance relationship with the scammer and is eventually extorted money.

In this paper we perform the first large-scale study of online dating scams. We analyze the scam accounts detected on a popular online dating site over a period of eleven months, and provide a taxonomy of the different types of scammers that are active in the online dating landscape. We show that different types of scammers target a different demographics on the site, and therefore set up accounts with different characteristics. Our results shed light on the threats associated to online dating scams, and can help researchers and practitioners in developing effective countermeasures to fight them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The data about the users of Jiayuan was collected according to the company’s privacy policy and it was only accessed by two of the authors of this paper, who were Jiayuan employees at the time the research was conducted. The authors external to Jiayuan did not access any personal or sensitive information about any user on the online dating site, but instead worked with aggregated statistics.

  2. 2.

    Note that this number takes into accounts also those accounts that never received a message at all on the site.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments. We would also like to thank Ali Zand, Adam Doupé, Alexandros Kapravelos, Ben Y. Zhao, and Christo Wilson for reviewing an early draft of this paper. Your feedback was highly appreciated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jiayuan Corp., University College London, London, UK

    JingMin Huang, Gianluca Stringhini & Peng Yong

Authors
  1. JingMin Huang
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  2. Gianluca Stringhini
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  3. Peng Yong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gianluca Stringhini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Magnus Almgren

  2. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Vincenzo Gulisano

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Federico Maggi

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Huang, J., Stringhini, G., Yong, P. (2015). Quit Playing Games with My Heart: Understanding Online Dating Scams. In: Almgren, M., Gulisano, V., Maggi, F. (eds) Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment. DIMVA 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9148. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20550-2_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20550-2_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-20549-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-20550-2

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