Greg's Corner

Nurses being targeted in romance scam

Since we’ve been discussing the online romance scam lately, we hadn’t thought that romance scams are targeting particular occupations, until now. According to The Plain Dealer newspaper of Cleveland, Ohio, they’ve received inquiries from two people in the same occupation that have received the same letter. The two people live in different parts of the country as one lives in Cleveland and the other in Denver. Both correspondents are hospital nurses who have received not only the exact same email but they were written someone claiming to be the exact same person. Thankfully, both nurses were skeptical of the emails and did not respond but shared their stories with the Plain Dealer.

The letters start off claiming that the man sending the emails had a wife who passed away who was treated by the nurses. The emailer states that he hasn’t stopped thinking about the nurses since his wife has passed and would like to get in touch with them. What caught the nurses’ attention was the fact that the emailer would be vague about what facility he met the nurses in and the medical information he gave about his supposed wife indicated that she could not have been treated by the nurses. For example, one of the nurses works in neonatal care where she could not have possibly treated the man’s wife. Both letters are postmarked from Baltimore and are said to have come from a man by the name of Allen Knox.

When it comes to scams, if it’s happening in one or two parts of the country it’s more than likely that it’s happening in other parts of the country too. The way these scammers find their targets is through social media where apparently, they are now looking for certain occupations. Be extra careful as to what you share on social media as some scammers can use this information to craft a ploy to appear as they know you personally and you’ve just forgotten who they are. It’s also recommended that if you receive one of these letters that you should change your passwords on all your online accounts and we would recommend using a password manager like LastPass to make your passwords more secure. We also recommend making sure that all your accounts are secured by two-factor authentication which you should be doing anyway. Lastly, you may want to also invest in a locking mailbox to prevent scammers from going through your mail.