The U.S. embassy in Accra, Ghana, reports receiving up to 15 calls a week from Americans who have lost money on relationship scams originating in Ghana....

The top 10 states for Internet fraud include no New England states. The list does include California, Texas, Florida and New York.

There are also official warnings from the State Department with regard to dating scams originating from the Ukraine.

Scam artists are tapping into the online dating market, and in two cases in Hampton Falls, have stolen thousands of dollars from women who thought they had a romantic relationship.

The Hampton Falls Police Department is investigating two cases of online fraud.

The local women were duped out of thousands of dollars they'll likely never recover, Police Chief Robbie Dirsa said.

One case began in January 2002, he said, after one woman met a man online through the Yahoo Personals. She loaned him, over the course of more than a year, $109,000 for his alleged trucking business, Dirsa said.

The couple had a few dates, Dirsa said, though police are investigating whether the man she dated is the same person she met online or someone sent to get the money. The man she dated is described as a white male, in his 50s. She said he lived in-state.

Police know very little about him, even though they have a name and an e-mail address.

Some people are embarrassed to come forward and admit they've been taken, Dirsa said. This may be particularly true of senior citizens who respond to e-mail requests for money.

Schemes out of Nigeria are notorious, he said, because the country will do nothing to cooperate with U.S. investigations of Internet fraud.

"This is money absolutely gone," he said.

Because he had no fear of being prosecuted, the man continued to ask the woman for money even after he knew she had gone to law enforcement.

Internet scams are very prevalent, said Gail Marcinkiewicz, a Boston spokeswoman for the FBI. She had no statistics for online dating fraud.

Internet complaints are sent to the National White Collar Crime Center in Richmond, Va., which works with the FBI, Marcinkiewicz said. Victims are encouraged to make complaints to www.ifccfbi.gov.

Julie Ferguson, executive director of The Merchant Risk Council, according to Desilets, is reported to have noticed a marked upturn in the number of calls she receives on Internet dating fraud, from one call every three months to "one every couple of weeks or so."

Dating sites and chat rooms are one of the primary means by which suspects make contact with new victims, according to information given to Desilets by Supervisory Special Agent Dale Miskell.

Miskell is in charge of an FBI CyberCrime squad in Birmingham, Ala., and has worked extensively with Nigerian authorities to combat reshipping schemes. This is when online thieves purchase items with stolen credit cards and have them sent to an innocent party to be shipped out of the country.

To shed some light on the scope of the problem, several e-groups and Web communities exist for networking between victims, Desilets said. A prominent one is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/romancescams/