No one is say­ing they are gold-dig­gers. But they are not mess­ing with broke peo­ple.

The Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit (FIU) is warn­ing of an in­crease in “ro­mance scams” tak­ing place in this coun­try.

Kevin Radix of the FIU warned of the on­go­ing sit­u­a­tion as he ad­dressed the Cen­tral Fi­nance Fa­cil­i­ty’s (CFF) An­ti-Mon­ey Laun­der­ing/Com­bat­ing Fi­nanc­ing of Ter­ror­ism (AML/CFT) Train­ing Work­shop which took place ear­li­er this week.

The CFF’s two-day vir­tu­al train­ing was at­tend­ed by over 30 par­tic­i­pants from 11 Cred­it Unions.

“Mr Radix en­cour­aged cred­it union par­tic­i­pants to not take any­thing for grant­ed. He added that in the process of loan ap­pli­ca­tions, cred­it unions should be vig­i­lant, as a num­ber of per­sons are ex­posed to fraud­u­lent fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions such as ro­mance fraud and scams,” a re­lease from CFF stat­ed yes­ter­day.

And the is­sue of ro­mance fraud is some­thing that the FIU al­so high­light­ed in its an­nu­al re­port which was pub­lished last month.

“The ty­pol­o­gy can be con­sid­ered a so­cial en­gi­neer­ing tac­tic as it en­tails the ‘en­gi­neer­ing’ of a friend­ship or re­la­tion­ship for fraud­u­lent, fi­nan­cial gain,” the FIU stat­ed.

“Ro­mance fraud in­volves a per­pe­tra­tor ar­tic­u­lat­ing fab­ri­cat­ed ro­man­tic in­ten­tions to­wards sus­cep­ti­ble vic­tims, most­ly fe­males, in an at­tempt to gain their trust and ma­nip­u­late them to ac­cess their cash, bank ac­counts or even cred­it cards,” it stat­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to the FIU the per­pe­tra­tors, who may be ei­ther lo­cat­ed in T&T or in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, con­tact their vic­tims through so­cial me­dia or dat­ing web­sites.

“Once ini­tial con­tact is made, the per­pe­tra­tor at­tempts to ‘en­gi­neer’ a re­la­tion­ship with the vic­tim by ex­press­ing the need for com­pan­ion­ship and ro­man­tic in­ten­tions,” the FIU stat­ed.

The FIU added that it has been ob­served the pri­ma­ry tar­gets are con­sid­ered to be at a po­ten­tial­ly vul­ner­a­ble stage of their life in­clud­ing di­vorcees, re­tirees, wid­ows, or sin­gle women.

It stat­ed that in most in­stances the vic­tims have nev­er seen the per­pe­tra­tor and that pho­tographs are usu­al­ly stolen from oth­er so­cial me­dia users.

“Once trust has been es­tab­lished in the ‘re­la­tion­ship’, the per­pe­tra­tor makes a fi­nan­cial re­quest. This re­quest en­tails the per­pe­tra­tor re­quest­ing that mon­ey (for a ‘ship­ping’ com­pa­ny) be de­posit­ed in­to an in­di­vid­ual per­son­al ac­count not known to the vic­tim for the pur­pose of a ‘pack­age’. This pack­age al­leged­ly con­tains gifts such as clothes, jew­ellery and even mon­ey for the vic­tim,” it stat­ed.

“Most times, re­quests for ad­di­tion­al funds are made by the al­leged couri­er ser­vice cit­ing the rea­son as ad­di­tion­al cus­tom du­ties giv­en the con­tents of the pack­age,” the FIU re­vealed.

The FIU said once the mon­ey has been de­posit­ed in­to the ac­count it is usu­al­ly with­drawn the same day or soon af­ter via ATMs or in-branch with­drawals.