To think some romance scam victims are simply stupid?

A lot of the time, though, we might imagine this is all two week's chat and then the begging starts, but these people are good at what they do. Sometimes they have spent a year or more sucking their victim in. Getting really close, building a relationship, getting someone to fall for them.

It seems obvious to the outsider, but I have seen programmes on this where the victim has been in constant internet conversation with the scammer for a very long time. Some say they were suspicious at first but as they got closer, they started to relax. They enjoyed time spent with Bobby Scammer. There was a valid reason they hadn't met IRL, usually distance/finance on both sides, or so they thought. Bobby Scammer doesn't push anything, gives plenty of realistic details about his life, and gradually gets his victim to the point where the 'relationship' is important to the victim.

Conversation then turns to serious effort to meet in person. Scammer knows the victim wants this. Perhaps Scammer invites the victim to come to America/Australia/wherever, knowing full well she can't because she's got X medical condition. She reminds him, he says, oh, of course. I'd come to you but money is tight, etc.

And then it starts. Victim is in deep at this point, will often have been forgoing friend and family time to chat with Bobby Scammer every night. If she wasn't vulnerable before, he's pushed her into a state of vulnerability simply by getting her to want to spend online time with him.

We all think we wouldn't fall for it under any circumstances, but when it's a massively gradual process, I can see how it happens. Not dissimilar to the charmers who are the perfect boyfriend until they move in.

When people have invested so much time in a relationship and become deeply in love, they aren't always rational. They might have been six months before when it was just a bit of flirty messages and they weren't really invested in it.
The warning bells might ring as the money requests come thick and fast, but the relationship you've had for a year can't all be lies, can it? You know there's something wrong, but you don't want there to be, because you don't want to lose the man who has been so perfect, so wonderful, so funny, he understood you so well, etc.

No different to the women doing exactly the same .

A lot of them seem more driven by loneliness and a need to take care of someone, so I have a bit more sympathy. Still a level of collusion in the whole thing though, I've said before I think it's more akin to addiction than fraud.

No different to the women doing exactly the same .

I actually particularly battle to have sympathy for some of the men scammed on Catfished. Men in their sixties and seventies, sometimes with a wife, who think that some beautiful young woman is madly in love with them. Obviously very easy to play on someone's ego and letchery.

Exactly! People who shout ‘victim blaming!!’ when really, sometimes, just sometimes, it really, really is your own fault!

@SomeCatFromJapan yep that too

The problem with scams is that they work by making you want to believe them. That means that the person most complicit in lying to you is yourself, and you are as clever as you, and know you very well. Its why people with low intelligence and high intelligence can be sucked in by scams, cults, conspiracy theories etc. The more clever you are, the more clever the person deceiving you is.

Any financial scam usually involves a great degree of stupidity from the person being scammed. I know someone who lost all his pension fund investing in unregulated investments such as an Argentinian oil well that hadn’t even been drilled! Unbelievably stupid.

Generally the "woman" scamming the male victim is a nineteen year old Nigerian bloke with some images of porn actresses.

It's a mix of the lonely and deluded and very very naive - even my 85 year old father in law wouldn't fall for this claptrap- and it happens to men just as much as women - some people work in mixed gangs using the women as bait .

@Doesthishurt I've seen the same scam covered on Catfished.

@ThomasinaLivesHere
It started off with a fake bank account of the fraudster, he told the victim to put "his" money in to his own bank account for him, as he "was in hospital, and couldn't do anything". The bank was called "Regional Bank plc" and it does not exist, I think it must have been someone who has worked for a bank and knew the systems. Anyway, then this "bank" locked her out after a couple of payments, so he asked her to transfer money from her own bank. Experts are saying it's one of the most sophisticated frauds they've come across.

Did the bank make her borrow £50k from her family- seriously people need to take responsibility

@Doesthishurt Out of interest, how was the scam sophisticated?

I know this is an old thread, but I was listening to BBC Radio 4 earlier today, programme was called "You and Yours", discussing a woman's account of a very sophisticated romance fraud, she was tricked out of £80,000 ! All in installments, and she borrowed £50,000 from her mum and sister. In the end, it was her sister who became suspicious. The thing is, her bank are saying they are not liable, but the victim is blaming her bank. Have a listen on BBC Sounds and then have your say?
@Tarquina
I believe most of the victims of romance fraud are men, according to Amber Haque, a journalist and podcast presenter, who was on a late night show on BBC Radio 5 Live last night. I promise you I don't work for the BBC btw !

I know someone who gave 5k to a ‘romantic scam’. Would have been more but the bank blocked it. The story was he was a pilot, he messaged her for 3wks, declaring he loved her and was sending her a package with 10k in it. But it got stuck in customs and she had to pay this money as a release fee. First a few hundred and then 5k! I used to think no-one could be so stupid, but she’s incredibly vulnerable. She’s the kind of person they target. This so called pilot who was British had broken English and it couldn’t have been more obvious it was a scam to me.

oh and the bank gave her the money back!

It’s not just romance scams, either.

If someone phoned you out of the blue, and told you you’d won £1m in a lottery you hadn’t even entered, and that person or others, then kept phoning to say that unfortunately there would be some hefty payments for ‘tax’ before you could receive your win, what would you think?

This is how a neighbour of ours was scammed out of over £100k. She wasn’t lonely, just very naive and trusting, especially when the initial caller told her she worked for NatWest Bank.

There's a big difference between intelligence and wisdom.

I disagree. People are stupid. No common sense. Or delusional, have serious mental health issues or have dementia. I'm 65 and would never in a million years be so stupid! The second a young person is trying to hit on you or the minute somebody asks for money, you run like hell. Not seeing either as totally delusional and screaming SCAMMER is just baffling.

This happened to a friend of mine. He was 55 and had just retired as deputy headmaster of a fee paying boys school. He was a grammar school boy himself who went to Cambridge University and was then a teacher all his life.

He got a lump sum pension from his last school of £50,000. He got scammed by a woman in Africa who "fell madly in love with him" after they met on Plenty of Fish and she took him for the whole £50,000, which was all the money he had.

When he told me all about it it was so hard not to say "how could you be so stupid?" But that was all I kept thinking. This man had a high IQ, he was worldly, intelligent educated, and yet he fell for it.

I would like to know, who has been scammed by an older, less attractive person? Not many., i would hazard a guess.

Not in the type of romance scam you quote, no. But there are other kinds of online romance scams that are far more subtle. I agree, anyone who says they are 'in love' without having met, and asking for money or 'getting engaged' to an online persona with no knowledge of them in real life is a very obvious scam.
I'm just pointing out that there are many many kinds of romance scam online - some of which are very clever indeed.

I think we’re talking here about internet or ‘a bistro waiter I met on holiday’ romance scams, not Madame Bovary or Casanova style seductions.

I don’t think there’s any subtlety in utterly ridiculous, out of the blue declarations of love.

There is. I don’t believe it could happen to anyone. There’s other people out there, who are just as lonely and desperate but they wouldn’t risk giving away all their savings, putting themselves in financial difficulty, max out their credit cards, take out loans, sell their house, borrow money from friends, lie to their families, lie to their bank, lie to the police etc all for a stranger/person they barely know, selling them a fantasy. Everyone, absolutely everyone, knows there are romance scammers out there. It’s well documented and the dating sites include warnings because it’s so common.