Romance scams

[NextDoorToAlice]

How can someone fall for a foreign love who they never met who wants money and more money and more money while making excuses not to meet while wanting more money.

There was something on TV this morning about a man who fell for a romance scam and lost 85000 pounds and his home and made himself homeless in the process.

My mother was watching this having the utmost of sympathy for him and I just kept thinking - he's a fool.

Surely if someone was to fall for something like that, what is the cut off point. Surely someone should have stopped after 50/100/250/500/1000 pounds. He stopped at 85000 pounds. It's too much. I can't believe he went on TV because what it looked like to me was that he found someone interested in him and he was trying to buy her love.

I remember getting a call from my phone company who wanted me to confirm my name which I did. Then he asked me to confirm my address and all hell broke loose over the phone with me shouting at him - 'How do I know that you are legitimate and that this isn't a scam....go f*ck you' and I hung up.

Yeah and also these scams don’t take 5 minutes. It’s not hey I’m Brad Pitt send me a tenner, it’s weeks or even months of manipulation, back and forth conversations, I’ve even seen someone making deepfake videos of ‘Brad’ holding a piece of paper saying love you Maureen. It’s so easy nowadays to make something look believable.

Yeah and also these scams don’t take 5 minutes. It’s not hey I’m Brad Pitt send me a tenner, it’s weeks or even months of manipulation, back and forth conversations, I’ve even seen someone making deepfake videos of ‘Brad’ holding a piece of paper saying love you Maureen. It’s so easy nowadays to make something look believable.

I suppose they probably do want to target vulnerable older/old people as a preference; but considering that their usual MO is to scattergun their lies as far and wide as they can and hope that a few people will bite, they probably figure that a young, beautiful person could be attractive to almost any adult of the appropriate sex and sexual orientation.

If they pretended to be in their 50s or 60s, most potential victims in their 20s, 30s, 40s wouldn't be tempted in the first place; nor indeed the delusional people who are a similar age, but who somehow think that they deserve/can get somebody much, much younger.

It's always stayed with me when I read once, ages ago, and the penny dropped: the scammers deliberately make their scams ridiculous and implausible, as they don't want to waste their time with people who respond sceptically in the first place and then quickly drop out; they only want vulnerable, delusional and/or greedy people who, if they don't see how ludicrous it is from the outset, may well go all the way to handing over large amounts of money.

I also agree re landlines. We still have a 'legacy' one, which I keep meaning to scrap - now that the only elderly family member who used it to contact us has now discovered mobiles and WhatsApp - but the only call attempts we ever seem to get are from scammers.

They're truly nasty people who know exactly what they're doing and whom they want to target as their victims.

I just tell spam callers that before we go any further, and so I can confirm they are who they say they are, I need to ask them some security questions first. 😂