A former top Wellington public servant arrested on a cocaine charge in Argentina while en route to meet a man she met on online may have fallen prey to a 'scammer farm'

A former top Wellington public servant arrested on a cocaine charge in Argentina while en route to meet a man she met on online may have fallen prey to a 'scammer farm', an expert says.

Sharon Armstrong, aged in her early 50s and a former deputy chief executive of the Maori Language Commission, is being detained in Buenos Aires after being arrested on April 13, accused of trying to leave the country with five kilograms of cocaine in a false-bottomed suitcase. It is unclear whether she has been charged.

It is understood she was on her way to London to meet a man she had been dating online.

The man had paid for Armstrong to divert to Buenos Aires and pick-up some ''paper work'' for him there, her cousin Kapoi Mathieson told Radio New Zealand.

His facebook page has since disappeared.

Mathieson said Interpol was searching for the man, and the family had forwarded all the details they had about the contact between the pair.

"There is no way that Sharon would do something like that knowingly," Mathieson said.

"There is no way. My whole family, all my cousins, are ringing each other crazy quite distraught about it that she's been duped like this."

Mike O'Donnell, head of operations at Trade Me, who run online dating website FindSomeone, said the case was "pretty sad" and it sounded like Armstrong was "emotionally vulnerable" and may have been preyed on by an online scammer.

"What this person will have likely fallen for was a scammer farm... a whole range of people who are applying their skills to infiltrate relationships with a whole bunch of vulnerable people."

Rather than just being scammed by one person, O'Donnell said 'scammer farms' were usually a group of people who worked from an organised spreadsheet with background information on the target which included details like the tone of previous conversations.

He said scammer farms had a "whole number of people on their hooks at different stages".

It is believed Armstrong had been communicating online with someone for more than six months. They did not meet via FindSomeone.

She was due to travel to London to meet him but, at the last minute, her flights were changed to go via Argentina so she could attend to some documents the man said he needed for a new job.



O'Donnell said FindSomeone noticed a spike in international scammers approaching members around a year ago.

Since then measures had been put in place to prevent people located overseas, including some regular visitors from Australia, signing up, he said.

FindSomeone in the United Kingdom and Canada were also shutdown.

FindSomeone has more than 100,000 active members and on a typical day more than 15,000 messages were sent between members.

Each time a message was sent, members see a warning which reads "Never send money or financial details to people who send you a message through FindSomeone".

Members were also encouraged to report anyone acting suspiciously.  

"Safety is critical. FindSomeone has pretty extensive safety information on how to identify scammers in advance including elaborate advice on when you go from online to offline," O'Donnell said.

He said people should follow their instincts: "If it's too good to be true, it probably is."