Now, it is women who have become the target of similar attacks.  Luis Corrons, PandaLabs’ Technical Director advised that their security team has detected a huge increase in the number of scam e-mails coming from men who are interested in starting relationships with women.

“We usually see these scams directed towards men,” Corrons said. “The emails usually include photos of really hot women. But in the scams directed towards women, they don’t attach a photograph. My guess is that the guys doing this are thinking that women are more into a man’s personality, rather than his appearance.”

Almost all these “romance” emails originate in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia and the Ukraine. PandaLabs has evidence that seems to link the same criminal organizations that were targeting men, with the emails romancing women. In an interesting difference, the emails reaching out to women claim to be coming from a British man. In some emails he’s a widower looking for a fresh start. In other emails he writes that he’s a well educated guy who hasn’t found the right girl yet.

Researchers from PandaLabs contacted one of these “Casanovas” in order to reveal the truth behind so much loving. After the first contact, the story develops in exactly the same way as with the Russian women. The men want to travel and meet their love interests, but unfortunately to do so, they need some financial help.

“As with the fake Russian girlfriends, the fact that a man expresses his love for a woman will undoubtedly attract her interest. We don’t really know how many of them will fall for this, but I must admit that the message has been cleverly-crafted to trick female users,” Corrons said. “Putting our minds into the minds of the criminals, we think that they are imagining that a woman who has money to spend isn’t going to be attracted to a Russian man because he doesn’t speak the same language. But a guy from the UK — that’s different and she will think that there might be a relationship there.”

PandaLabs isn’t seeing huge waves of these emails targeting women, but Corrons commented that if the scams work, “we’ll see many more of them.” There aren’t firm figures on how many scam emails succeed, but Corrons is sure that they do because the criminals keep sending them. PandaLabs doesn’t believe that these love frauds are big earners like phishing emails, since each victim can be taken for only $500 to $1,000. However, it’s nearly free for the criminals to send out hundreds of thousands of emails, so if they get a response from less than one percent of the addresses, there’s a good possibility of an acceptable return on the time invested in the scam. 

People who have been using the Internet for a while, might find it strange that anyone would respond to such e-mails. Corrons had a more forgiving view.

“Every day we see new people coming to the Internet and they are not that familiar with this kind of thing,” he said. “Most people when they have been on the Internet for ten years, they have seen many examples of these tricks where people try all sorts of ways to fool you and take your money. That’s what these scams are all about. But still there are new people to fool. Criminals are constantly trying new things to find new victims.”

He has a point. According to InternetWorldStats.com, as of June 30, 2010, just about 30 percent of the population in the Middle East was online. This means that for the foreseeable future there will be new users to scam in this region.     

“People need to use some common sense,” warned Corrons. “If someone sent a letter to your street address or post office box and in that letter it was written, ‘I found your address and I want to meet you and get to know you better.’ Would you write back? Would you give them money to come and meet you? Never! But for many people, when an e-mail saying that exact thing shows up in their inbox they think, ‘Wow, that’s great!’ and they reply.”

Don’t do that. Just press the delete key.