Catfishing cosmonauts, scamming soldiers: Never fall in love online?

Eventually the moment comes in every online romance scam where the mark is asked to send cash to pay for the likes of an urgent medical operation or flights home. — dpa

BERLIN: Easy money, a super job, the dream apartment, a huge inheritance and, of course, the love of your life: internet scammers promise them all. If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.

A particularly perfidious and also common form of internet fraud is catfishing, which involves scammers posing in social networks or dating apps and pretending to be in love so to make their victims emotionally dependent on them. A warning sign is that actual face-to-face meetings never happen.