With the increased use of social media, the number of online scams has also increased dramatically. Recently, a 65-year-old Japanese woman was duped online by a fraudster posing as a Russian astronaut on the International Space Station (ISS).
The woman became sceptical of the huge amount of money he asked her to transfer to him. The fraudster had asked the woman to pay for his trip to return to earth and had promised to marry her after his return.
The two met on Instagram in June this year. The fraudster had uploaded random images of space and claimed that he worked at the International Space Station where astronauts have limited access to mobile phones.
Their relationship grew quite intense in no time. He repeatedly expressed his love for her and proposed marriage on LINE, a Japanese messaging app. He reportedly wrote to her, “I want to start my life in Japan,” and “Saying this 1,000 times won’t be enough, but I’ll keep saying it.” “I love you.”
But, he explained, he needed money to return to Earth in order to marry her. He explained that there were landing fees to pay in Japan as well as the cost of a rocket to fly to the country.
The woman paid him 4.4 million yen which is about $30,000 and about 24 lakh INR in five instalments from August 19 to September 5, believing him to be her future fiancé, according to the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.
However, soon the woman grew suspicious of the ‘astronaut’ who would repeatedly press her to send money. The woman later filed a police complaint and the matter is under investigation.
As per Asahi TV, a Japanese media outlet, Another Japanese woman in her forties was followed by an Instagram handle claiming to be a Russian astronaut on the International Space Station.
For the next two days, the two communicated via the app’s direct messages feature, with the astronaut likely using software to translate messages into Russian and the woman conversing in Japanese, according to the report by Asahi.
The “astronaut” then sought that the conversation be moved to another app, which made the woman suspicious. The woman, however, decided not to continue the conversation.
It’s also possible that there are many more cases like this that haven’t been reported to the police. Japanese police do not keep separate records of romance scams like this one, but there has reportedly been a significant increase in online scams over the last decade.
