Process

How do you recover?

How do you recover from a scam? Understanding scams from a Feminist Perspective. Closure of Life After Scams. New Podcasts to listen to about how I experienced the scam and how I recovered.

I often get asked “ How do you (they mean “I”) recover (from a scam)?”

It raises the question, what is meant by ‘recovery’?

Does ‘recovery’ mean:

Understanding what has happened and why?
Getting over being ‘in love’ with your scammer?
Having ‘normal’ relationships again?
Finding someone in the real world to love or be in relationship with?
Dealing with the financial devastation?
Finding a way to live with reduced financial expectations?
Get lost funds back?
Returning to normal relationships with friends and family?
Being able to ‘get on with life’ and trust others and one-self?
Come out from behind the shame and guilt about one’s part in the scam?

A friend who was experiencing grief over the death of a child said “You don’t get over it, you learn to live with it”. This is very much how I feel about recovering from being caught in a scam. But learning to live with it does not mean in any way being closed off about what has happened. For me, going public about being scammed was the most impactful action about my recovery. It means that I

Acknowledged that I had made a mistake, and that making mistakes is OK, it is human. I was able to forgive myself for getting caught in a scam, and for being out of rational control while in the scam
Educated myself about scams, and educated others about scams by writing about this in my blog, and my book, and speaking out publically about my understanding of scams
Regained my self respect every time I spoke up about being scammed, and was able to overcome being shut down and isolated from the shame of being scammed
Sought to make a difference to others either to prevent them making the same mistake, or, by sharing my experience and understanding about what people feel after a scam, hoping they feel less alone
Continually, when interacting with a scam victim, or talking to the public, put the responsibility back onto the perpetrators of scams. Whatever my personal responsibility was it was minimal in the face of the individual fraudulent activity of scammers and organised crime in general.
Highlight the power imbalance of scammers who train themselves to be skilled emotional manipulators by using proven scripts, lying and cheating without compunction against victims who open themselves to friendship and love from the goodness of their hearts.

Dr Cassandra Cross says, after much research into scams,

“People cope differently from this experience: some are angry, some are depressed, some talk of suicide, while others spend every waking hour trying to figure out how they were scammed and try to prevent it happening to others.”

Cassandra Cross, Lecturer in Criminology at QUT. Love Hurts: the costly reality of online romance fraud. The Conversation. 11 December 2014, .

I know I am the latter, but not everyone is this. Another quote, about grief, from Stephanie Ericsson, but really its about life!

Recovery is about learning how to live again. Which means:

Owning your feelings
Forgiving yourself
Finding understanding and healing where you are intuitively drawn to it
Living in the moment
Finding ways to express yourself fully, creatively, and to others
Not hiding

And all of this takes time. I can say this fully 9 ½ years after being scammed. It is now time to be proud of what I have done.

Feminist Perspective

I mentioned above about the power imbalance in scams.

My understanding of this was greatly enhanced by this recent opinion piece.

https://augustafreepress.com/amy-gdala-and-acacia-oudinot-to-fight-cyber-fraud-liberate-women/

This article takes a feminist perspective on scams, because of their greater impact on women. In this country, at least from the statistics, there is not as great a difference in the numbers reporting scams or loosing money from scams as this article claims, however many of the arguments within this paper echo statements I have made myself.

“Love Fraud is a long-con technique that uses social media to find victims and social engineering to subdue them. Scientific research shows romantic love is as addictive as cocaine. Romance scammers leverage this susceptibility through a technique called “love bombing”, using constant, highly validating messaging to trigger an oxytocin dependency in the victim. This grooming process often takes months. Once a victim reaches what scammers refer to as the “ether state”, they’ve essentially been drugged into an emotional stupor that has key psychological side effects including high levels of trust, generosity and impaired judgment with financial decisions. The effect is so powerful that victims — who hail from all education and income levels –are often remotely controlled into draining their bank accounts and sending shocking amounts of their money to someone they’ve never met. Friends and family watch in horror, their interventions powerless over this complex, traumatizing scam.”

Reading this made me remember that after the scam I felt hyper-sexualised, awoken sexually, wanting more sex. Though I have resisted defining the state created in a scam as an addiction, similar to drug addiction, I can see, on reflection, that this hyper-sexualisation is exactly what is being talked about here as the ‘oxytocin dependency’. Maybe I was lucky that I was only in my scam a short time. For those who were in their scam for longer periods, I can understand how it is even harder to step away from the emotional state that is created in a scam. I have seen this often in the victims I have spoken to, and the families that have contacted me about thier loved one caught irritrievably in a scam.

The use of women in particular, to launder money from other scams, often with the witting or unwitting collusion of financial institutions, is definitely worth raising as a feminist issue. Uniting around raising awareness of this would be one way to make the personal become political, and take steps towards recovery from scams.

Life After Scams Closure

Over a year ago I began the process of setting up a new organisation, Life After Scams as a charity to provide emotional help to victims. After a grueling 2020 COVID-19 year, I have found myself with no energy to provide help in this area. I am proclaiming myself and this work done. I am stopping my public work as a scam victim advocate, and closing down the charity.

In the process I have had great acknowlegement about what I have contributed over the past years, and it is now time to claim this. Here’s one…

“Have just seen your email about closing Life After Scams. Sad that this is happening but completely understandable. I just wanted to drop you a note to say thank you for the immense contribution you’ve made to educating people about romance scams and supporting other victims. I am confident that a great deal of heartache and financial pain has been saved thanks to your efforts. I wish you every happiness in the future.
Very best wishes
Delia”

Delia Rickard Deputy Chair Australian Competition & Consumer Commission

Podcasts

Recent publication of two new podcasts end the year 2020 with the focus on scams within the context of relationships. Listening to these highlight how I experienced the scam, how I made sense of it for myself, and how I recovered from being scammed. Many thanks to Georgia Love and Tammi Faraday for these excellent podcasts.

Two new Podcasts published

Everyone Has an EX, Host: Georgia Love

See my Media Page for a full description. Listen to the What’s Mine is Yours episode.

Brave Journeys, with Tammi Faraday

See my Media Page for a full description.

Open the links to get your favourite Podcast provider and listen to Jan Marshall – From Romance Scam Survivor to Warrior episode.

Scam money goes to organised crime

We knew it, right? Scam money goes to international organised crime syndicates. Well, to be truthful, that’s what we suspected, but did not have enough information as a lay-people to really know it for sure. Now we do, after a lengthy expose on Australian ABC’s 4 Corners program called Meet the Scammers, Mon 11 Feb 2019, by journalist Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop.

As well as information about the network behind an organised crime king-pin arrested in Canada in 2014, the program talks in depth to some ‘game boys’, some “entry level criminals” in Ghana, according to a Ghanaian police official about how and why they scam.

What is interesting about these ‘café boys’ is the ease with which they talk about their ‘business’ of scamming and how they justify scamming as a legitimate way to make a living and get ahead. They also refer to the colonisation of West Africa that took place in their great-great grandfather’s time, and how taking money from westerners is payback for this.

Professor Monica Whitty, now at Melbourne University, describes scammers as “masters of manipulation” and the reporter shows sites which enable emerging scammers to learn the trade by buying proven scripts, getting documents or images photoshopped, acquiring bank accounts, getting help from those who have already proven it works. This seeking for ‘best practice’ is mentioned several times, and seems to happen at the lowest and highest levels for everyone’s mutual benefit. That’s everyone in the scamming business, not their ‘clients’ [ie, victims].

Identity theft and the setting up of fake online profiles based on stolen photos is the basis of these scams. Even gender is not sacrosanct, with these young black ‘game boys’ portraying themselves as both men and women, and talking openly about online sex with both men and women ‘clients’.

One scary point the expose reveals is how romance scams are easily and often linked to money laundering and drug mules, showing several victims of these. This is where organised crime really comes into play, and a case with a criminal based at Villawood detention centre in 2014 is depicted. The more recent arrests at Villawood Detention Centre, (see also my previous blog on this) was also mentioned.

Scamming, according to Deputy Commissioner Neil Gaughan of the Australian Federal Police is happening on an “industrial… global scale”, and figures of $12 Billion over 5 years was cited by an American commentator. That’s US Dollars! Everyone knows though that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

On the plus side is the fact that some arrests have happened, that finally the police internationally are seeing how big this is and how widely it is connected and are finally beginning to doing something about it.

As usual the devastation for victims is talked about, but nothing mentioned about the support scam victims need after the event.

One of the people profiled in the program is Colonel Bryan Denny (Ret.), who’s photo has been used on social media and dating sites for years. He, together with Kathy Waters, who’s mother was a scam victim and have set up a support group http://www.advocatingforu.com/ and are seeking to change the 230 Communications Decency Act of 1996 to better combat identity theft in America. To support them, sign their petition here.

Well done to victims Chyrel Muzic and Peter Strand for also talking out about their scam stories. We need more victims to speak out.

Congratualtions Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop on a great program.

Is the psychological abuse in domestic violence similar in scams?

In the past years, since Rosie Beatty became Australian of the Year, there has been much emphasis on Domestic Violence and the toll this takes on many women, as well as programs to combat this. Regular readers of this blog will know that I see Romance Scams as a form of abuse, but one that in comparison gets very little support or acknowledgement, except when the increasingly disastrous financial figures are published. So how are these forms of abuse similar and different? Analysis has begun on this topic by Dr Cassandra Cross and her colleagues. Continue reading Is the psychological abuse in domestic violence similar in scams?

Different types of romance scams

The more contacts I have from people who have been scammed the more I see the different types of scams that are being carried out. The amount of ‘romance’ can vary. There are a number of types of activities that have building a relationship as a primary focus. You will find these listed on the governmental sites that talk about scams as Online Scams or Fraud, and this is a more generic description. Only when you read the detail does it make it clear this relates to what is commonly known as ‘romance’ or ‘dating’ scams.

In my blog I have focused on scams that use romance as the hook to then enable the scammer to exhort money. The contact mechanism is often dating sites, but can also be any membership site or social media such as Facebook or even communication mechanisms such as Skype or Viber. Whilst dating sites have the benefit (to the scammer) of legitimacy and expectation of making contact, because that is the purpose of the site, other mechanisms, like on Facebook, the scammer is putting out a ‘cold’ request for contact with no automatic expectation, except social convention and politeness perhaps, of a response. They must be successful though, because they keep doing it, and I know from victims who respond thinking “its just friendship, it can’t hurt”, that whatever lure they are using, it works. Continue reading Different types of romance scams

Devastating financial consequences

The direct and most tangible consequence of being caught in a scam is loss of money. Some people don’t realise they have been scammed until large amounts are gone, never to be returned. For some, its smaller amounts. Whether its small or large is not a measure of its impact. I have seen people loose relatively small amounts, but given that they have small incomes and large outgoings, this has had a huge impact on them.

Regardless, the response to being under the spell of a scammer when they ‘take the brain’ is that we will go beyond reason to give money. Not only do we loan our carefully sequestered savings, we can also take on more debt, sell our hard earned assets, and steal, beg and borrow money from our families or other places. We will loan whatever we can get our hands on to the scammer. We won’t know till later that this money will not come back. As we are defrauded, we condemn ourselves and our families to a different and poorer future.

It is beyond devastating when we realise that not only are we are not going to get the money back from the scammer, as promised, but that there is nothing anyone else can do to get it back either. That money is gone into the ether (a.k.a. the scammer’s pockets). In western society we expect to be able to make redress when things go wrong. There are normally laws which say this is wrong, and the person can be apprehended, charged, found guilty and there may be possible restitution or support as victims of crime. In the international and digital circumstances where most scams operate today, this is not possible. Local or national law enforcement, wherever we are, do not have any jurisdiction in other countries.

I remember when it first happened to me, many friends and family said insistently, there must be someone who can do something, the police, the national police, a parliamentarian…. Whilst the law enforcement agencies are building relationships internationally in areas where scammers operate from, and this has had some effect on scammers being caught in those countries, this makes minimal overall impact on the amounts being defrauded by scammers. New scammers will quickly step into the spaces left.

But I wanted to talk more on the personal level about the financial consequences, and will go through this in phases, primarily based on my own experience.

Phase 1: Immediate survival

When we finally realised we have been scammed, we may be, as I was, unable to survive the immediate period financially without additional help. I had given away pay I had just received and had no way to pay bills and buy food for the following few weeks. I had to borrow from a friend to get through the ensuing weeks. Not having been able to do this would have left me destitute and greatly damaged my future credit rating. Thank you friend!

Luckily I had a job, but those who are out of the workforce who have given all of their reserves and sold all of their assets are in more dire straits, having to rely on sometimes unsympathetic friend and family for help. They may need help of every form, food, accommodation, bills. They need this help at the same time as dealing with the shock of the emotion loss of a loved one (the scammer) and the shock and shame of realising that money is not going to come back. Also this is a time of dealing with police, making reports to law enforcement agencies, trying to understand scams, and changing email and bank details. It all takes time and effort and often has to be done outside of work hours. This phase, I suggest covers about a month.

Phase 2: Reduce outgoings

In the ensuing months, we will need to cancel any discretionary expenditure we may have had, when we had lifestyles and assets. This may be magazine or web site subscriptions, gym subscriptions, find credit cards with 0% interest periods, get lower levels of health insurance, lower cost car insurance, etc.. In situations where we may have lost credit ratings, or be losing significant assets such as houses, it can involve substantial paring back.

In those first months I had to juggle which bills I would pay, knowing that as I had a well-paying job, I would be able to rectify any un-payed bill in the following month. Creative cash flow accounting I call it.

Luckily I had a job, a place to live which I could continue to afford, and the semblance of my life on the outside continued as normal. I was able to rationalise my financial loss as equivalent to someone loosing money in and investment scheme gone bad, and there had been a lot of those during the global financial crisis.

Eventually I did have to move to lower cost rental accommodation. For many, they may not have work or suitable accommodation, and I cannot imagine what life is like for them. I spoke to one lady who was sleeping in a chair at a relative’s place, having lost everything. For many who are older, there will be no opportunity to work again, to re-establish an asset base, and it can mean that already they have been reduced in a short time from able to manage financially to joining the ranks of the poorest in our society. They may need to rely on family (sympathetic or not) or charities for support.

Its is important to get financial counselling appropriate to your own situation at this point. Financial laws are different in different countries regarding processes such as bankruptcy.

Phase 3: Managing longer term impacts

This will be an individual matter depending on each person’s circumstances. For me, though initially I had a good job and was able to survive week to week, I had, when under the scammer’s spell, taken money from my superannuation/retirement fund that I was not allowed to do. It took me 2 years of legal negotiation with the Australian Tax Office to find that I would be taxed at the highest rate on this money, leaving me with a tax bill of over AU$76,000 in addition to all that I had lost. It was a hard lesson that organisations such as these do not have any compassion for a person’s circumstances, even when there is, within the law, supposed ‘discretion’.

At about this point, I was also retrenched from my job. Whilst I did receive a redundancy payment, over time I found I was not able to find another suitable job. I put this down to my age of being 61 years old. As a consequence, I found myself in extreme hardship, not being able to cover my outgoings with a meagre unemployment support, which in Australia we call Newstart.

This meant I could have been out on the street, loosing my rental accommodation, if not for being able to get some hardship money from my superannuation/retirement fund. I have joined the ranks of the poor and possibly destitute. I am sure this is similar to many that have fallen victim to the professional fraudsters that we know as scammers.

In summary, the loss of money from being defrauded by scammers may bring on periods of extreme adjustments in lifestyle. This may occur at the point of realisation, or later, but is likely to be significant, commensurate with the amounts of money lost. Full impacts may not be known initially, but may be revealed years later. Whenever it is revealed, it is likely to be in a negative direction.

My thought and prayers go out to all who find themselves in this situation.

Taking the brain…

I saw the term “taking the brain” in an article where an ex-scammer talked about the stages they go through in a scam. It is the end goal of “love bombing”, the intensive grooming that scammers go through, where “the victim’s defences are broken down by exhaustion, social isolation and an overwhelming amount of attention“.

In the long article in AARP The Magazine , Enitan [false name used in the article], the ex-scammer says

“The goal is to get the victim to transfer allegiance to the scammer. “You want them thinking, ‘My dreams are your dreams, my goals are your goals, and my financial interests are your financial interests,’ ” he says. “You can’t ask for money until you have achieved this.”

I’ve had a number of contacts recently from family members of people who they believe are being scammed, and have given away huge amounts of money. They wonder why they cannot get through to their loved one, and reached out to me for help. I also saw a show on Dr. Phil where he interviews a woman who has given away US$300,000, and was still declaring her love and refusing to admit she had been scammed.

Those who have realised they have been scammed continually get the question, “How could you give you money to someone you have never met?” It is nearly impossible to explain to people who have not experienced it. This phrase, “taking the brain” is the best explanation I have seen yet. It is no wonder, that with this intent plus tried and true techniques being used by scammers, that those caught in the scam have agreed to marry their fictitious partner, feeling like they have found their one true love. This is the confirmation to the scammer that they have control, and can now ask for money. I certainly felt, after I realised that I had been scammed, that I was not in control of myself at that time. It is not detectable from the inside the scam though.

On a SBS TV program showing a BBC Documentary 2015 – Is Your Brain Male or Female this week I saw that oxytocin, the honeymoon hormone which increases the level of trust when in love, only impacts women. This was a surprise to me, because the numbers of men scammed is greater than women, though women report it more, according to the AARP article where they quote Monica Whitty’s 2008 book, Truth, Lies and Trust on the Internet. The article again quotes Whitty:

Computer-mediated relationships, she says, can be “hyperpersonal — more strong and intimate than physical relationships.” Because the parties are spared the distractions of face-to-face interaction, they can control how they present themselves, creating idealized avatars that command more trust and closeness than their true selves. “What happens is, you can see the written text and read it over and over again, and that makes it stronger,” she says.

It has always been the level of intimacy developed in a scam that I think is not well understood or believed by those who have not experienced a scam. The level of intimacy may have been made even more intense by cybersex, which can be used as a form of ‘consummation’ of the virtual marriage, and cement the achievement of the goal of ‘taking the brain’.

It is in the context of the intimacy developed during a scam, the ‘taking the brain’ that I come back to the issue of loved ones who are being scammed, and what family members can do about it. The victim when confronted may refuse to believe it is a scam and may be continuing to send money. There is no easy answer as to what to do, especially as unacknowledged feelings of shame and denial in the face of relative’s insistence that it is a scam may push the victim to take a stance of “its not a scam, its true love and you would not understand“, words given to them by the scammer, even more strongly. Again from the AARP article:

Shame, fear of ridicule and the victim’s own denial enforce this contract of silence. “Once people are invested in these , it’s extremely difficult to convince them they are not dealing with a real person,” says Steven Baker, director of the FTC’s Midwest Region [USA] and a leading expert on fraud. “People want to believe so bad.”

This family interaction is hard for everyone involved, and can lead to break-up between family members. It is quite different from the scenario in my post I think my friend is being scammed, where friends were discussed. Family relationships may be much more emotionally loaded. There are also more serious financial implication, as assets are sold, inheritances are given away, loans are taken out and the victim is left with less than nothing. The bewildered family may be left with the ongoing financial burden or at least the need to support the now destitute scam victim.

I am trying to think if there is anything more that could be done in these situations apart from what I suggested in my previous post. I think in these situations it is more important to contact the authorities, and see if you can get any involvement from them. Hopefully they would be tracking activity of scammers. I’m hypothesising that an interaction with an independent third party of authority may help.

Please add your own comments below if you have ideas about or success with any other tactics when confronted with a family member who is actively being scammed, so we can all learn from this experience. Contact me directly and I will post on your behalf if you require anonymity.

Finally, the article quotes our own Brian Hay, head of the fraud unit of the Queensland Police Service in Brisbane about the fraudsters:

Think romance fraud on an industrial scale. “The strongest drug in the world is love,” Hay says. “These bastards know that. And they’re brilliant at it.”

Reference:
AARP THE MAGAZINE
‘Are You Real?’ — Inside an Online Dating Scam
A con man steels one woman’s heart – and $30,000. Here’s how it happened.
by Doug Shadel and David Dudley, AARP The Magazine, June/July 2015

I think my friend is being scammed…

I was contacted recently by a woman who was concerned for her friend and wanted some urgent advice. “I have been listening to a friend’s beautiful love story unfolding, and then realised where it was heading”, she said. She had seen the same pattern previously herself but had pulled out. She had found my blog and got in touch. She acknowledged that “Although we are both intelligent women our need to be loved, and love, is stronger than reason, as you know”. Yes, I know this only too well and at a high cost.

I had already been thinking about this question, and had even drafted a book outline on the topic. I had been warned by friends, but disregarded the warnings, and have ‘kicked myself’ since. So here are a few pointers to help, from the perspective of being a friend. (Remember that men can also be scammed by women, its not allways this way around.)

Understand how scams/scammers work

It important that you understand how scammers work so you can understand what is happening to your friend.

The scammer has gathered information on your friend, and knows their weak points, and how much they want to be loved. They will have no qualms about using this against your friend to their monetary advantage.
The scammer will profess love quickly and deeply, making it seemed destined, special, magical, and its natural for anyone wanting love to respond to this. Though the text of emails, messages, chats are tried and tested pro-forma materials, they will seem genuine, personal and include promises of forever love. Your friend may at this stage be sharing with you the excitement of finally found their one true love.
When ‘in love’, the hormone oxytocin is engaged, and this heightens trust, so the friend will be more trusting of the scammer than they might otherwise be. This means that they will be more likely to not focus on the inconsistencies in the experience, passing them by.
They will be communicating at all hours, especially through the night, keeping your friend sleep deprived. This makes it more difficult for your friend to make rational decisions when the scammer eventually asks for money. The scammer may also provide legitimate looking documents as evidence of their credibility or financial capacity to repay money.
When confronted about being a scammer, the scammer will respond with righteous anger, feigning affront, and will encourage the friend to cut off from others, especially those with warnings.
The scammer will say that “what we have is special” and “they would not understand so don’t bother trying to explain – they will understand when they see us together – don’t talk to them”. They will not ever intend to be together, but they will profess and promise otherwise. The scammer will encourage your friend to cut off from you and other friends or family. This may mean they will try and push you away or cut off from you.
A high level of intimacy will be developed, including possible connections to others in the scammer’s imaginary family, including children. This adds an element of normality and family intimacy which counters the sense that it might be a scam.
They ask for honesty and make lots of promises (but will never return them).

As a friend of someone being targeted for a scam

Keep close contact with your friend and resist being pushed away. Encourage them to keep sharing with you. You may want to just cry out “Stop it” but this might push them away from you and its important to keep the communication open.
Be respectful of what your friend is feeling, however try to keep them open the equal possibility that it is a scam.
If you can, get actual emails and photos of the scammer. Use these to do some checking using some of the sites such as romancescam.com, and scamsurvivors.com to check for previously stolen photos and search for stand-out segments of text. As the same ones are used frequently, you may find them already reported, giving you information to take to your friend as evidence of a suspected scam. Also do a Google image search on the photo: you are looking for the photo being connected to other names than the one used by the scammer. Make sure you check on all results pages, and check for any google messages saying there is more to be seen, checking these results as well. If you have the technical ability you can check the IP address in the email header as well to see if it is coming from the same location as the scammer.
If you do find evidence that it may be a scam, present it as another possibility, not “the truth”, and encourage your friend to look further for themselves. Be careful not to make them wrong or unworthy of love. When this happened to me I became rebellious, insisting that I deserved to be loved, and it pushed me further towards the scammer.
Scams of the Heart Blog link

Here are some what not to say and why tips from by Soraya Grant in her Scams of the Heart blog. This blog is excellent, and well worth a read in more detail.
The person who contacted me made a great point about the need for a friend to match the time and energy level of the scammer, and identified the “need to apply just as much bombardment of information and support, even when it feels like intruding”. She specifically judged when her friend could take in and be receptive to certain pieces of information. It takes a great friend to do this – I commend her on her efforts.
If you are not sure what to do, reach out, to me or some of the other sites offering support resources. There is help out there. See my Support for Victims of Scams page.
If your friend does part with money, and then realises they have been scammed, encourage them to report it. See my blog on this.

Luckily in this instance we can report a good outcome. Contact was broken off with the scammer, and life has moved on.

One last thing.. be wary about secondary scams. Once they are in contact they may try again. This includes, for example, scammers pretending to be police or Interpol, saying they have your money, or your scammer, including providing forged documents about this. Don’t be tempted to go there, its another scam. More on this in my next blog.

Groomed to give our money away

Even after realising we have been scammed the one question that remains, not only for our friends and families, but also for ourselves is “How did this happen?”, “How could I, an intelligent, successful, down to earth, usually rational and responsible person, have done this?” I took several months to write out all that happened into a diary/timeline after realising I had been scammed. Even after doing this I still did not fully understand. That came later…

The reality is that we are ‘groomed’, similar to how child abuse victims are groomed.

These tactics of grooming by child abusers include[1] :

the ability to charm, to be likeable, to radiate sincerity and truthfulness
establishing a trusting relationship, for example spending time with them and listening to them. They may treat the child as ‘special’; giving them presents and compliments.
6 Stages of Grooming, courtesy of Camp How
use gifts and trickery to manipulate and silence the child into keeping the sexual assault a secret. This treatment can isolate the child from siblings, friends or parents.
gradually desensitising the child and violating their boundaries. For example, they may spend a lot of time with the child when he or she is bathing, dressing, or going to bed.
convincing them that if they tell about the sexual abuse, something terrible will happen
giving the child the impression that they have consented and that they are in a ‘relationship’ with the offender, or even that they initiated the relationship
making the child to feel responsible for the abuse, and feel too ashamed or scared to tell anyone.

As I compiled this list for this blog I understood even more about the deliberation used in romance scams. By changing the word child to person, and other minor changes to the sentence, all of the above happen in a romance scam (at least my scam), often including sexual abuse (through cybersex). There is one more tactic though that is more relevant in scams of adults, an understanding of which adds to the picture.

In my list of being groomed for a romance scam the scammer:

builds a very strong and intimate relationship, so that it feels in your mind like they are part of the family. This may include initiating a proposal of marriage, and positioning for and ‘committing to’ a long term partnership or marriage. I have highlighted ‘committing to’, as there is never any intention of following through on this in a scam.

Points 1, and 6 from the child grooming list above are relevant here. As well, there is evidence that as we become more ‘in love’ the love hormone oxytocin will create more trust and develop more empathy. We are very familiar with the ‘honeymoon period’ of a relationship and I suspect this is partly what is in operation during this period. We know from outside that when someone is in the honeymoon period we are in an altered state, we are seeing things ‘through rose coloured glasses’ and that it will, over time, pass and things will become normal again.

Donna Andersen[2], in her blog on Lovefraud.com, from her understanding of the work done by Paul Zac comments:

When psychopaths target us for romantic relationships, they shower us with attention and affection. They spend a lot of time talking with us, and conversation builds trust. They say and do things to indicate that they trust us, and we should trust them. They tell stories about themselves designed to appeal to our empathy. They rush us into emotional, physical and sexual intimacy.
All of this causes the release of oxytocin in our brains, which is absolutely normal. Because of the oxytocin, we feel calm, trusting, empathetic and content. We especially feel trusting of the person who caused this reaction in us — the psychopath.

Though Donna Anderson is considering psychopaths in a much wider context of romance related fraud than I am with romance scammers, I think the term is applicable. Scammers are unfeeling, and unconcerned with consequences, and when I replace psychopath with scammer, these statements are absolutely true.

Secondly, in romance scams, we are cut off from others. Initially we are cut off from the safety of the dating site, by encouraging us to talk via email, and then talking via a chat or video messaging system such as Yahoo Messenger or Skype. They will never let you see them in person however, because who they are is not the handsome person in the picture they have presented themselves to be in the dating profile.
We are encouraged to cut off from friends and family who might warn us.

If there is any sense of others warning us that this might be a scam, we are encourage to not listen to what others are saying, because “what we have is special, and no-one will ever understand” combined with ”I don’t want your emotions to be upset” and “when they eventually see us together it will be easier to explain”. And because we are now trusting, and feeling we have a special intimacy, we cut off from our friends.

Thirdly, point 5 above for child grooming translates in a romance scam to “If you don’t give me money something terrible will happen”. This might be innocuous initially, for example, I need something for my business supplies, but as the story is developed, there is ‘evidence’ of awful things happening such as threats of violence to the scammer; stories of being mugged/robbed; car accidents where people are killed; threats of prison and/or not being able to leave the country. These circumstances or reasons for needing money are given in a context of increasing levels of danger and urgency to allow the scammer to get to where their money is accessible and they can repay you the ‘loans’ that you have provided to get them out of trouble. If you don’t pay, terrible things will happen. Which because you are trusting, you believe.
Fourthly, and this one may be adult specific, scammers keep you sleep deprived

and continually engaged so as to minimise the time you have to reflect and think rationally about what is happening. They talk to you late at night, early in the morning, and through the middle of the night. Often requests for money happen in the middle of the night 1 am – 4 am when it is hard to resist them.

A friend used the term ‘spellbound’ when I was talking to her about my experience, and this term is very appropriate. We have been spellbound through professional and deliberate manipulation of our emotions by professional fraudsters, grooming us to part with our money. It was not personal for them, but the impact is very personal for us.

[1] Laurel House: North and North-West Tasmania Sexual Assault Support Services http://laurelhouse.org.au/?page_id=36 Sexual Offender Tactics and Grooming

[2] Donna Anderson, LoveFraud.com Blog from May 2013 Oxytocin, trust and why we fall for psychopaths

Scam Methods, Trends and “sextortion”

Wayne May and Monica Whitty know a great deal and the latest about scams. Wayne is the CEO and Founder of the UK based site ScamSurvivors.com. Monica Whitty researches scams from the University of Leicester. They both know about scams and can talk about what the trends are, what methods are currently being used by scammers.

Monica Whitty being interviewed in 2012 — Monica Whitty being interviewed, 2012

I had known about Monica before. She has a great research report which I have provided a link to on the Research page of this site. I recently discovered this worthwhile video of her being interviewed about her research. In particular I was struck by her comments about how people are groomed, which is done by keeping people sleep deprived, and separating them from their friends. That certainly happened with me. Its only 6:04 minutes, so watch the interview here.

For a recent update, I found this audio podcast from The Guardian Tech Weekly. She starts off talking about some recent hi tech movies, but then gives a good update. Her interview starts at 31:45 minutes into the hour long program.

I came across these videos of both Monica and Wayne because they are attending iDate as speakers. iDate is the Conference for the dating and internet dating industry, and there are several conferences held in different places around the world for different markets. Monica and Wayne are scheduled to speak at the London iDate Conference in October 2015. I’d love to be there and hear what they say is the latest this year.

Wayne May I had not heard of before, but was very pleased to see an interview from him from the same conference held in 2014. This one lasts 43:06 minutes, but there are gems all the way through. He talks about “sextortion” as the latest trend, where people, mostly men, are inveigled to strip off and perform acts on videocam, this is saved, and then they are blackmailed by threats to show the videos to family and colleagues. Scamsurvivors.com covers all sorts of scams, not just romance or dating scams. It has a whole forum for sextortion. It also has other videos, and photo galleries as well as provides 24/7 support for victims or suspected victims of all types of scams.

More than this though, if you have any questions about scam, how they work, who they impact, how you identify one, who looks after sites like these, all of them are asked and answered by Wayne May in this video. Its well worth the watch.

In fact, take some time, watch, listen to them all. I will post these links onto the research page when I next post.

Let me know what’s your favourite video or resource about romance scams?

How do they research you, so they can better hook you in…?

In the early days with my scammer, we exchanged emails with a lot of questions in them about what we liked and did not like. In the context at that time the questions seem innocent enough, but embedded in them are key questions that the scammer can later use. Eg. when he went back to England he asked if I knew anyone in England. My negative response to this let him know that he did not need to worry about me knowing too much about where he lived.

In general conversations/exchanges about interests, passions, previous relationships, etc there will be items that you share about what you like and don’t like. One item I put on my profile was an interest in property investing. That is a give-away that you have an interest in money making ventures.

By revealing themselves first, and saying that they are looking for someone who is honest and open, they lay the ground for you being the same. E.g

"Relationships: Give 100%, if this can not be given, then you are not that true friend, lover or husband/wife. Be true to yourself, and your love ones. Honesty, communication, and understanding along with patience will make the difference. This is just my opinion mind you. Sharing, is more than finance, material assets, more importantly, it is the sharing of yourself, time, and love. Giving always more to the other, and they will give back. It is a forever revolving door of giving..."

As well as giving away information that can be used, what is not commented on by the scammer can sometimes be telling. My scammer did not comment on my political inclinations, my spiritual preferences, or seem to take more than a cursory interest in Australia or Victoria. this felt a bit odd at the time, as they are areas that can be disastrous and deal breakers in relationships. These were items that I wanted to know about him, but did not get the chance to follow up. In hind-site, the absence of a response shows how shallow the communication actually was, but at the time things were moving at such a pace that it was difficult to pick up on this.

Instead the talk turns to what feels special… and this is the hook!

"I will say my heart tells me you are one very special woman. Whatever will be between you and I, please know you have a friend for life regardless of the miles between us. I feel very blessed that you responded to my email, that I will cherish forever. In our walks of life, it is not often you come across another who still has morals, family values, respect and continues to follow their dreams.

Its so easy to not take notice of the contradictions or incongruities. We must get better at making sure we do follow up on these.

If you think you are being scammed, get in touch with ACORN . Remember its not just a scam, its a deliberate and professional fraud that is being perpetrated.

ACORN: The Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting Network.  This is an national policing initiative that allows cybercrime victims to easily and instantly report cases of criminal activity online, as well as providing information on how to avoid falling victim to cyber criminals.