• Together with the avalanche of ‘fake Russian girlfriends’ that have proliferated over the last few months, marriage proposals to women have also started to flourish

PandaLabs, the anti-malware laboratory at Panda Security –The Cloud Security Company–, has been warning for some time about the fake ‘offers of romance’ that plague the Internet: Beautiful women, mostly from Russia, use social networks to contact men in order to start a relationship and offer to travel to their countries to show them ‘their love’, yet don’t have the money for the trip. However, once the love-struck man has transferred the cash, the beautiful woman just disappears.

Now it is women that have become the target of such attacks: PandaLabs has detected a huge increase in the number of emails received through social networks from men willing to contact women. This time, the bait is not an eye-catching photo, or a semi-erotic proposal, but a message from a man offering a serious relationship and presenting themselves as the perfect partner: responsible, with a stable income, romantic, funny, a good father, highly educated, capable of speaking several languages, a widower looking for love, etc.

Our lab researchers have contacted one of these ‘Casanovas’ in order to reveal the truth behind so much loving. After the first contact, the story develops in exactly the same way as with the Russian women: They want to travel and meet their lovers at all costs, and to do so, they unfortunately need some financial help.

“As with the fake Russian girlfriends, the fact that a man expresses his love for a woman will undoubtedly attract her interest. We don’t really know how many of them will fall for this, but I must admit that the message has been cleverly-crafted to trick female users” says Luis Corrons, Technical Director at PandaLabs. “Just as nobody gives something for nothing, it is highly unlikely for somebody to fall in love with someone else just by having a look at their profile. We advise every user that receives this type of message, both men and women, to be very wary of them as on most occasions –actually in almost 100 percent of all cases-, they are just a scam”.

More information is available in the PandaLabs Blog.