To think that women who fall for romance scammers are idiots?

[YourAmplePlumPoster]

Are women who fall for romance scammers idiots?

It's certainly a different type of scam, but the psychology of deception and social engineering employed by scammers is the same, regardless of the reasons for the victim's vulnerability.

Idiots really seems harsh, scammers work by being exceedingly convincing and sophisticated and often working on vulnerability. We are all potentially vulnerable to being scammed, whether in romance, finance or anything else, we need to be aware and cautious in dealings online and the phone, being caught out doesn’t make anyone an idiot

Yes she obviously was vulnerable emotionally. To say someone was nice, that they had money in their bank account so therefore all must be ok is not how most people would view the situation. A man you met once giving you access to his bank account is not normal. Under any circumstances- nice man or not. Even if there was no scam most people would not entertain a man like that as they would see a massive red flag.

That’s a heartening story, about the right thing being done in the end at least. But it’s completely irrelevant.

The thread is about romance scams, not financial scams. Anyone can be taken in by a sophisticated financial scam or breach of trust. Every year there are dodgy investment schemes exposed, and even solicitors done for defrauding clients. That’s not the point.

It’s a good thing that people who send money to ‘Brad Pitt’ are made to feel foolish: it helps people avoid being taken in. If we go around saying “Never mind, it’s not your fault. Anyone could have thought that Ryan Reynolds picked them alone from Facebook to befriend and ask for money” we just help the scammers.

If the financial scam involved preying on a specific emotional vulnerability then it's similar but someone for example clicking on a website link thinking it's legit but turns out it's fake is completely different.

But it's showing we can all be susceptible to scams. Not all of us to romance scams, but by demonstrating that we all could be scammed at some stage it might stop people victim blaming and have some empathy to those scammed in the romance scam and not label them idiots.
So it is relevant.

Every single story includes a lonely woman. Be thankful you’ve never been that lonely.

It’s not relevant. A fraud who runs an elaborate con, lies about authorisation, lies to the authorities, produces false paperwork etc etc is completely different to some crook pretending to be a Hollywood star who’s fallen in love at first sight with a profile picture.

Yeah I got romance scammed. Not for long, but yes I did hand over some money. It was 18 months after dh died, a month after my dad died and I think I was a bit mad. But yes, I knew really it was a scam even as I was doing it. I have a gambling streak and a saviour streak. All very silly.

I'm very sorry for your losses. What you've said is really interesting and confirms the impression I got watching things like Catfished - that there's a level of collusion to these romance scams and seems to be a similar dopamine-hit type scenario to gambling.

But it isn't the hot young guy in the photo actually doing it! It could be somebody with a face like a bag of spanners and extremely poor personal hygiene!

You'd actually be much better just finding a picture of a hot young guy online and fantasising that you're in a relationship with him - without a deeply unpleasant, deceitful, criminal middleman with a dog-eared Mills & Boon book trying to jemmy open your bank account at the same time!!

Probably. But people are very susceptible to being scammed. Look at all the Mumsnetters who believe in psychics.

So you don't feel sorry for vulnerable people who are targeted at all?

A little old lady who gets mugged for her handbag in the street at gunpoint? After all, the gun might not have been loaded, so she might have survived if she'd refused.

A child on their first lone shopping trip who gets charged treble the price because a crooked assistant adds on a fake, made-up 'tax' that "Surely your parents told you about"? Even though the child handed the money over, when they could have refused and walked out?

I'm not sure that some people properly appreciate the full spectrum of vulnerability - especially when it's a hidden, isolated area in a perceived 'non-vulnerable' type of person.

The same as most people understand that a wheelchair user is an ordinary person just like everybody else whose legs don't work as they ideally should; but somebody with schizophrenia who shouts at you as a terrified symptom of the voices they hear in their heads is assumed to be nasty/evil/stupid/weird and deserves all they get as a result.

My dad was scammed for years. Not romance, plain old financial scams. I came to feel at one point that in a way he was paying for attention. They were oleagenously nice to him, called him Mr Temporary and Sir, maintained the pretence of him being a 'business partner' to them. Essentially he was buying something he wanted. It was complicated in his case because he was simultaneously embezzling and extracting the money from friends and his girlfriend. But there is always something the mark gets out of it imo. For me, it was romantic messages from a 'widowed Norwegian architect called Bjorn'. (Is Bjorn even a Norwegian name? Not sure.) This also gave me something I wanted.

I disagree.

Many of these men and women are prepared to exploit friends and family to get money to give away to scammers.

Most of us can look at ourselves and reasonably accurately assess our likely worth in the romance market.

Most sensible overweight women in their 60s with a modest home and income realise the right man for them is probably an overweight man in his 60s in similar circumstances to her own.

Any woman who has failed to find a suitable man in real life, should realise that a handsome, high-ranking US military officer in his forties, is unlikely to fall in love with her. She should also have the wit to realise that such a man would not need to ask her for money.

She can give him all her money and sell her house to give him more, if she thinks the tiny chance he is genuine is worth it, but the thing that disgusts me is that - when they have run out of their own money - some start scamming their genuine friends and family to get more.

I saw one case on television years ago where such a woman was "borrowing" thousands of pounds from her neighbour.

He was a kind man of her age, similarly attractive and financially stable.

Unfortunately, she was too stupid to realise that the man for her probably wasn't the rich handsome man in America. It was the man next door.

This is a really interesting way of thinking. Scams aren't only on-line! I would never be taken in by a romance scam or a prince who needs me to help him access his money, but in person? I've fallen for a few; the 'I'll stop smoking weed,' the 'of course I want children with you, just not yet' etc. They were all scams. Thanks, ClareBlue, you've given me a lot of food for thought.

@Rummly "It’s a good thing that people who send money to ‘Brad Pitt’ are made to feel foolish: it helps people avoid being taken in. If we go around saying “Never mind, it’s not your fault. Anyone could have thought that Ryan Reynolds picked them alone from Facebook to befriend and ask for money” we just help the scammers." You couldn't be more wrong. Victim-blaming and shaming helps no-one - it just silences victims, and the authorities who can make a difference are denied valuable data.
Sadly, both you and @Eagle2025 are focussing on the type of scam (so you can call victims "idiots" or "foolish" 🙄 ) instead of focussing on the psychology of deception and social engineering used by all scammers regardless of the type of scam. Please do some reading on the subject so you are better informed.

I’m very well informed thanks.

I think you’re trying to make a point on a false basis. The defrauded person you dealt with did not abandon their common sense. No amount of data will help people who do or will help anyone else protect them.

I can’t make a bank payment online now without being reminded that it could be a scam. What else could be done?

Idiot: "a stupid person" or "a person of low intelligence". It's entirely wrong to use this term because (a) even very intelligent people have been victims of scams and (b) it's unnecessarily cruel to someone who is already suffering.
It's entirely reasonable to tell a scam victim they've made a mistake and to help them understand why; what signs they could have looked for, the scale of online fraud these days (many victims think it's just them) and actions they can take to minimise being taken in again (sadly, many victims are added to a "suckers list" to be targeted again by other scammers), but to call them an "idiot" or even "foolish" doesn't help them one iota - they already feel foolish - in fact, the common refrain of scam victims is "How could I have been so foolish?".
We need to stop this narrative of victim = idiot. Shaming victims just helps the scammers.

This, absolutely.

Look at the famous Philip Zimbardo experiment - which I highly doubt would have only ever had those results in that place and time and would never demonstrate the same if re-run elsewhere.

Using psychology for nefarious purposes can influence pretty much anybody, if you catch the right person with the right scenario in the right circumstances at the right time.

Even on a low level, how many people buy expensive branded products, week in week out, when they've never even tried the much cheaper, often virtually identical ones - purely because it's the one advertised every day on TV and it repeatedly says that it's the best?

Well said. It's amazing the people on here claiming victims are stupid and they would never be so foolish when they are so mind-numbingly ignorant of the psychology used by scammers and the effects it has on the working of the recipient's brain. One day they'll be that victim asking "How could I have been so foolish?"

I take small comfort from this, but seeing many of the responses here and the results of the vote, I guess it's the best I can hope for.

The posters here just need to fuck around and find out. It's the only way they will learn.

(a) is just the same thing again: nobody’s saying that people should be incapable of falling for sophisticated cons. But that’s got nothing to do with romance scams of the common type, especially online.

(b) sure, in-person you might want to be nice to a scam victim. But there’s nothing wrong in saying in general that it’s foolish or idiotic to send money to a random on the internet who’s come out with a ridiculous tale of being a love-struck Hollywood heartthrob.

If you take the line that no care need ever be taken in life and it’s not foolish to believe everything you see online, whatever the circumstances, all you do is encourage people to act without judgement or thought. We all have some responsibility for ourselves. How much sympathy, help and compensation we should get will depend on the facts.

I'd agree OP.

At one end of the scale, I can see people falling for it - you meet someone IRL, you start hanging out together, you think you're a couple, after a good while it turns out they need lots of money for something. I know someone this happened to, pre-internet.

But at the other end of the romance scam scale - someone you've never met, who is younger and/or more attractive than you, who lives in a different place and actually, you never do meet them, but somehow you think you are in a relationship with them... (Or, someone you meet abroad and is younger/more attractive, and within 2 weeks wants to give up his life and move to the UK to be with you...) No way, and yes if someone falls for that then they're delusional.

"I'm very well informed thanks." I'm sorry, but you're just not (now I could have called you an "idiot" or "foolish", but I'm not that ignorant).
How can you claim that the client I helped "did not abandon their common sense"? For obvious reasons of confidentiality I can't recount here any details of the case, but I can tell you that many people, yourself included, would conclude they did "abandon their common sense" if you knew all the details. However, if you genuinely understood the psychology that had been used on them by the scammers, you would also understand that "common sense" can be easily "abandoned" by any one of us given the right circumstances. This is why I know you're not well informed - because you just don't seem to understand this and nor do you seem to want to.
The warnings on online banking are really there to absolve the banks of any responsibility - not to help the victims (although they may do occasionally). When people log on to their banking to make a payment, they already believe they're doing the right thing (my client certainly did and had been coached by the scammer what to do/say if their bank should challenge them - not that they couched their "advice" in these terms of course!). When did you last make a payment online that you didn't want to make, or believe you had good reason to make? No-one goes to make a payment online that they already think could be a scam, which is why those warnings really aren't that effective (and why 9 million people in the UK last year were the victims of financial scams alone - that's 1 in 5 people or 20% of the population who, according to some people, are "idiots" - and these are just the scams that are reported because many more victims will feel too ashamed to report due to victim-blaming, so the real figure is likely a lot higher).
What more could be done? We could stop this victim-blaming narrative. People who have the lazy "they're idiots/fools" attitude could do some diligent research to understand how and why scammers are so successful - to understand the psychology of deception and social engineering - not only might this make them more compassionate towards victims, it may also minimise their own risk of being scammed if they understood how easily they too could "abandon their common sense".

I wonder though, if you asked them afterwards ‘really and truly, be honest now, did you see a red flag’

they absolutely must have

we have all done this and ignored it during our lives. I know I have.