A RESEARCHER at the University of Ballarat has issued a warning about dating sites, saying they are being trawled by Nigerian scammers.Christian Kopp says lonely hearts in some states are losing up to $500,000 a month to African and Russian fraudsters.Mr Kopp, 46, said scammers may take months to build what appears to be the romance of a lifetime, before extracting gifts, large amounts of money or bank and credit card details. He said scammers could be persistent and convincing, and even when approaches were clearly suspect, people were still duped.Scammers were often keen to move communication away from traditional dating sites, where they could be blocked, to email, chatrooms or even the telephone.“Scammers will often use stolen or fake pictures of beautiful women and men,” he said.“Often the descriptions are long, most people in the beginning usually don’t tell much about themselves.“And the writing can have spelling errors in it.”According to a government report, a 72-year-old retired grazier from remote Central Queensland lost $200,000 to a Ghanaian scammer after his wife died. After several months of email exchange with a West African woman he received a phone call from the woman’s brother saying she had been in a car crash.There was no car crash but for months they bled him for money, and continued to dupe him even after he flew to Ghana.Mr Kopp plans to undertake a study over the next six years looking at why people allow themselves to become exploited, and why it’s so difficult for them to move on.He said he hoped to create an education model for potential victims.Mr Kopp said any internet dating site user would have been approached by a scammer at least once. The Australian government runs a scam information and reporting website at www.scamwatch.gov.auFollow @ballaratcourier