Kerala Police using drone cameras to ensure lockdown compliance

As millions of people get hooked to online dating platforms, their proliferation has led to online romance scams becoming a modern form of fraud that have spread in several societies along with the development of social media like Facebook Dating, warn researchers.

For example, extra-marital dating app Gleeden has crossed 10 lakh users in India in COVID-19 times while dating apps like Tinder and Bumble have gained immense popularity.

According to researchers from University of Siena and Scotte University Hospital led by Dr Andrea Pozza, via a fictitious Internet profile, the scammer develops a romantic relationship with the victim for 6-8 months, building a deep emotional bond to extort economic resources in a manipulative dynamic.

"There are two notable features: on the one hand, the double trauma of losing money and a relationship, on the other, the victim's shame upon discovery of the scam, an aspect that might lead to underestimation of the number of cases," the authors wrote in a paper published in the journal Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health.

Around 1,400 dating sites/chats have been created over the last decade in North America alone. In the UK, 23 per cent of Internet users have met someone online with whom they had a romantic relationship for a certain period and even 6 per cent of married couples met through the web.

"The online dating industry has given rise to new forms of pathologies and crime, said the authors.

The results showed that 63 per cent of social media users and 3 per cent of the general population reported having been a victim at least once.

Women, middle-aged people, and individuals with higher tendencies to anxiety, romantic idealization of affective relations, impulsiveness and susceptibility to relational addiction are at higher risk of being victims of the scam.

Online romance scams are, in other words, relationships constructed through websites for the purpose of deceiving unsuspecting victims in order to extort money from them.

The scammer always acts empathetically and attempts to create the impression in the victim that the two are perfectly synced in their shared view of life.

"The declarations of the scammer become increasingly affectionate and according to some authors, a declaration of love is made within two weeks from initial contact," the study elaborated.

After this hookup phase, the scammer starts talking about the possibility of actually meeting up, which will be postponed several times due to apparently urgent problems or desperate situations such as accidents, deaths, surgeries or sudden hospitalizations for which the unwitting victim will be manipulated into sending money to cover the momentary emergency.

Using the strategy of "testing-the-water", the scammer asks the victim for small gifts, usually to ensure the continuance of the relationship, such as a webcam, which, if successful, leads to increasingly expensive gifts up to large sums of money.

When the money arrives from the victim, the scammer proposes a new encounter.

The request for money can also be made to cover the travel costs involved in the illusory meeting. In this phase, the victim may start having second thoughts or showing doubt about the intentions of the partner and gradually decide to break off the relationship.

"In other cases, the fraudulent relationship continues or even reinforces itself as the victim, under the influence of ambivalent emotions of ardor and fear of abandonment and deception, denies or rationalizes doubts to manage their feelings," said the study.

In some cases, the scammer may ask the victim to send intimate body photos that will be used as a sort of implicit blackmail to further bind the victim to the scammer.

Once the scam is discovered, the emotional reaction of the victim may go through various phases: feelings of shock, anger or shame, the perception of having been emotionally violated (a kind of emotional rape), loss of trust in people, a sensation of disgust towards oneself or the perpetrator of the crime and a feeling of mourning.

"Understanding the psychological characteristics of victims and scammers will allow at-risk personality profiles to be identified and prevention strategies to be developed," the authors suggested.

Paris, Jun 16: Increasing numbers of readers are paying for online news around the world even if the level of trust in the media, in general, remains very low, according to a report published Tuesday.

Around 20 percent of Americans questioned said they subscribed to an online news provider (up to four points over the previous year) and 42 percent of Norwegians (up eight points), along with 13 percent of the Dutch (up to three points), compared with 10 percent in France and Germany.

But between a third and a half of all news subscriptions go to just a few major media organisations, such as the New York Times, according to the annual Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute.

Some readers, however, are also beginning to take out more than one subscription, paying for a local or specialist title in addition to a national news source, the study's authors said.

But a large proportion of internet users say nothing could convince them to pay for online news, around 40 percent in the United States and 50 percent in Britain.

YouGov conducted the online surveys of 40 countries for the Reuters Institute in January, with 2,000 respondents in each.

Further surveys were carried out in six countries in April to analyse the initial effects of COVID-19.

The health crisis brought a revival of interest in television news -- with the audience rising five percent on average -- establishing itself as the main source of information along with online media.

Conversely, newspaper circulation was hard-hit by coronavirus lockdown measures.

The survey found trust in the news had fallen to its lowest level since the first report in 2012, with just 38 percent saying they trusted most news most of the time.

However, confidence in the news media varied considerably by country, ranging from 56 percent in Finland and Portugal to 23 percent in France and 21 percent in South Korea.

In Hong Kong, which has been hit by months of sometimes violent street protests against an extradition law, trust in the news fell 16 points to 30 percent over the year.

Chile, which has had regular demonstrations against inequality, saw trust in the media fall 15 percent while in Britain, where society has been polarised by issues such as Brexit, it was down 12 points.

U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc is "very close" to achieving level 5 autonomous driving technology, Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Thursday, referring to the capability to navigate roads without any driver input.

"I'm extremely confident that level 5 or essentially complete autonomy will happen and I think will happen very quickly," Musk said in remarks made via a video message at the opening of Shanghai's annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC).

"I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level 5 autonomy complete this year."

Automakers and tech companies including Alphabet Inc Waymo and Uber Technologies are investing billions in the autonomous driving industry.

However industry insiders have said it would take time for the technology to get ready and public to trust autonomous vehicles fully.

The California-based automaker currently builds cars with an Autopilot driver-assistance system.

Tesla is also developing new heat-projection or cooling systems to enable more advanced computers in cars, Musk said.

Industry data showed Tesla sold nearly 15,000 China-made Model 3 sedans last month.

Tesla has become the highest-valued automaker as its shares surged to record highs and its market capitalisation overtook that of former front-runner Toyota Motors Corp.