Every day, Patrick Leroux denounces fake profiles using his photos on social networks. If his image is sometimes used to promote cryptocurrency, it is mainly misused to extract money from women who believe they are falling in love with a widower with two grown-up daughters and a cute dog.
In mid-February, I published a column about the first Canadian study on victims of online romance fraud. Patrick Leroux wrote to me the same day: “For 3-4 years, fraudsters have been stealing my identity. I waste about two hours a week reporting and blocking these fake accounts. Facebook and Instagram do nothing. »
Read the column “They only wanted to be loved”
Davis Jackson, Bobby Guinto, David Huderson, Lambert Charpentier… The aliases are numerous, but the profiles have things in common: the man is a widower, a civil engineer, he works abroad and he hides behind photos of Patrick Leroux posing with his children and his dog. (The crazy thing is that many scammers go so far as to use his real name. No problem.)
Patrick Leroux no longer counts these identity thefts. I’ve seen hundreds of screenshots showing different profiles. I have read messages from victims discovering that the man they love is in fact a married Quebecer. When it’s not one of their relatives who raises the alarm… “Simply to inform you that you have proposed to my sister. »
Believe me: it’s a mess.
Patrick Leroux may denounce fraudsters, but new accounts appear every day. Worse still, Meta sometimes refuses to delete them, considering that they do not contravene the platform’s regulations. The man is at his wits end: “It’s as if Facebook doesn’t take this seriously, when lots of vulnerable women are being scammed and losing a lot of money. »
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
Patrick Leroux
One of them was just robbed of US$100,000, if we want to be precise.
I spoke with his daughter, April. It was she who contacted Patrick Leroux to inform him of the crime committed with her image. April wants to preserve the anonymity of her mother, who is already drowning in shame, but she agreed to tell me their story. In 2022, the septuagenarian from Alabama lost her husband of fifty years. A disaster that left her alone and vulnerable. Then, a German man contacted her online. He looked uncannily like the love of her life, he was kind and, above all, he made her smile. Only problem: he had cancer and lacked money to pay for his medical care. As a good Christian wishing to help her neighbor and as a lover wanting to please, she flew to his aid.
Four months later, she admitted to her daughter that she had made a mistake… She had just paid her suitor $100,000. A sum left by her late husband, a sum that she would never see again.
“I couldn’t believe it,” April told me. I asked him: “But have you ever seen this man?” She swore to me yes. »
So April called him FaceTime. The guy replied. On the screen, it was Patrick Leroux’s face that was displayed… But in reality, the fraudster was filming a video of Patrick found on YouTube very closely and he was speaking over it. Of lipsync.
It was by doing an image search on the web that April was able to discover the origin of the stolen photos and diverted videos.
But what can Patrick Leroux, a [énième] once informed? Alert the police? This is what the SPVM recommends to victims like him, but Patrick does not have false hopes, knowing that there are numerous criminals and, above all, established abroad.
Quit social media? Inasmuch as coach business, man draws his work from it. It is on these platforms that it promotes its offer to potential customers. Obviously, he deleted several photos, but the damage is done. They were archived by criminals and continue to circulate.
In any case, the problem is not that a man has left traces of his life on social networks… It is that the platforms do not protect his identity nor the integrity of the women manipulated thanks to these images .
Patrick Leroux says he is a collateral victim of love fraud.
The co-founder of the Cybercriminology Clinic believes that he is a direct victim. He wastes time, but he also has to deal with the outraged (and understandable) reactions of people who have been cheated and see his reputation put at stake. When I spoke about Patrick’s case to Fyscillia Ream, she revealed to me that she had not never been contacted for this type of file. No doubt because it is Quebec victims who use the Clinic’s services and they succumb to fraudsters who mainly use photos of French people, she explained to me. In the United States, it is the profiles of Australians who are mainly looted. Patrick’s images are therefore probably used to steal from women who are not from here.
“Social networks unfortunately do very little in this regard,” Fyscillia Ream confirmed to me. However, certain remedies exist to improve online security. She gave me the example of dating sites that require facial recognition for users creating a new profile. Impossible to steal someone else’s image.
And what does Meta think of all this?
I would like to tell you, but my requests for an interview have been declined. If we are often transparent on social networks, we cannot say the same about platforms. A silence dear to pay for Patrick and a heartbreaking number of women.
An unfair silence.
Are you in the same situation? The SPVM’s cyber investigations module advises you to report romance fraud to local authorities, take screenshots of the messages, take note of the identities of the accounts that feed the threats, not engage in the exchanges and stop all contact.