To think some romance scam victims are simply stupid?

[TheAverageJoanne]

At home today and have the TV on with For Love or Money about romance fraud. One victim is an international business development manager but gave £113000 to scammers, persuading her mother and sister to part with their savings

How far the love of Christ would you trust someone with a responsible job when they do this sort of thing and judgement flies out of the window?

I get there are people who are lonely and vulnerable but this one took me by total surprise. How could she have been so stupid? She received an email while waiting for him at the airport, showed it to airport staff who confirmed it was fake but still sent another £30000 to prevent airport staff at the other side from killing him. Jesus Christ.

There's a good podcast about this

https://timharford.com/2022/10/cautionary-tales-the-online-date-thats-too-good-to-be-true/

Senior academic fell for scam. Not stupid, just really wanted it to be true and scammers are good at manipulating vulnerability.

Even the most intelligent person can be caught at a bad time, on a bad day. They might be stupid in that moment, but it doesn't presuppose general stupidity. We can all be stupid about certain things (see people who believe their children are the most clever or the most good looking in any given group).

@TheSilentPatient Having watched loads of romance scam stuff now, thete seems to absolutely be collusion on some level between scammer and scammee when it's romance scams.

These 'romances' go on for a long time though. It's not just a moment of weakness.

Yes, that's the 'certain thing' that the weakness lies in. Like my analogy with the parents who think their children are The Best. That's their weak spot. Lonely people have loneliness as their weak spot - let's remember that not ALL romance scammers are 20 year old gorgeous people. Some are very plausible right up to the point that the victim has been completely sucked in. It's not all surgeons who pronounce their love for you immediately and then ask to borrow $40,000 dollars the next day, romance scams can take lots of forms and be quite subtle.

"Some are very plausible right up to the point that the victim has been completely sucked in."

Ok well those ones may be different. I was thinking mainly of the ones where common sense would tell you they're fake.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

There's a big difference between intelligence and wisdom.

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.

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!

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 !

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

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

@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.

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

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 .

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

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.

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.