Modern online romance scams are premeditated, organized crimes that steal millions ― potentially billions ― of dollars from vulnerable, lonely people over the internet.
The scammers may just have lit upon the perfect crime: They sit at computers safely overseas, hunting for their prey on social networks, and they rarely get caught. The victims are often left deeply damaged ― both financially and psychologically ― and so embarrassed that they’re reluctant to come forward even when they realize they’ve been scammed.
Those in a position to help quash this fraud, meanwhile, treat it like “a small brush fire, when actually it is a raging forest fire,” said Dr. Steve G. Jones. Jones is a victim too: His name and photos were stolen to create the fake identities used in romance scams.
In the U.S., romance scams account for the highest financial losses of all internet-facilitated crimes, the FBI reports. The bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said it received 15,000 romance scam complaints last year ― a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Reported losses exceeded $230 million, but the FBI puts the true number much higher, estimating that only about 15 percent of these crimes are even being reported.
The odds of recovering that money, the bureau notes, are very low. Some of the money scammed by international criminal networks even winds up in the hands of terrorist operations like Boko Haram, according to Interpol.
HuffPost interviewed multiple women from six continents who had sent money to scammers they fell in love with online ― and who responded to HuffPost’s invitation on anti-scammer and other Facebook pages to talk about it.
Diana Warnack, 48, of Germany gave $18,000 to a man she met online. Intellectually, she knows she was taken, but emotionally, it’s a different story. “I am still in love with him. This is crazy, I know! He is still in my heart,” she told HuffPost. “I guess somehow everyone is looking for great love.”
We also talked with members of a cottage industry that has sprung up to support the defrauded: operators of scam-watch websites, counselors for fraud victims and people who self-identify as scam-baiters trying to trap the criminals so the latter can be arrested. And we spoke to FBI investigators, academics and researchers who study cyberfraud.
FBI Special Agent Christine Beining tells the story of a Texas woman defrauded by a scammer who called himself “Charlie.” The woman, a devout Christian, has since contemplated suicide, Beining said. Like Warnack, she still struggles emotionally to accept what happened.
“Even though she knows Charlie doesn’t [really] exist, there are times when she thinks the two men we arrested acted alone,” Beining said.
The two men in Nigeria pleaded guilty for their roles in scamming the Texas woman in July 2016 and were sentenced to three years in prison. But she didn’t get her money back.
She had openly discussed her faith on her Facebook profile ― something that gave Charlie a hook when he sought her friendship online in 2014. Their relationship progressed quickly and soon they were praying together ― online, of course.
The woman, who’s in her late 50s, said in an audiotape provided by the FBI (listen below) that she was in an “emotionally abusive marriage, and things had not been good for probably at least 10 years.” She was looking for happiness and thought she had found it with Charlie.
When he first asked for money to help finish a construction job, she said, “I prayed about it. I’ve always been a very giving person, and I figured if I had money … I could send him some.” That’s how she came to lose the first $30,000.
Over the next two years, she sent more money in response to each new story he told her, she said, because, after all, they were in love. Eventually, the woman’s financial adviser became alarmed about her steadily dwindling accounts and, suspecting fraud, urged her to contact the FBI. By that point, she had sent $2 million to a man she never met.
The Most Likely Victims
According to FBI data, 82 percent of romance scam victims are women and women over 50 are defrauded out of the most money.
Using fake profiles on online dating sites and social networks, including Facebook, scammers troll for the lonely and the vulnerable. They promise love and marriage and build what feels like a very real relationship to the victim.
Someone who has fallen for a scam before is a favored mark. Once victims send money, scammers put their names on a “sucker list,” Special Agent Beining said. Those names and identities are often sold to other criminals.
“We have seen victims become victimized again,” she said.
A Federal Trade Commission study published in 2013 found another telling commonality among all kinds of fraud victims: People who had experienced a negative life event in the previous 24 months ― lost a spouse, divorced, separated or lost a job ― were twice as likely to become the victim of a scam.
In her 2008 book, Truth, Lies and Trust on the Internet, psychologist Monica Whitty explained that computer-mediated relationships “can be ‘hyperpersonal’ — more strong and intimate than physical relationships.” Participants can control how they present themselves, creating “idealized avatars” that elicit more trust and intimacy than their real-life, face-to-face selves.
“What happens is, you can see the written text and read it over and over again, and that makes it stronger,” wrote Whitty, who focuses on how cyber technologies affect human beings and now works at the University of Warwick in England.
Law enforcement officials say that victims are often embarrassed to let friends or family know they’re sending money to an online stranger. And should they wise up, they may be threatened and blackmailed by their faux lovers. As insurance that their victims will toe the line, scammers may gather compromising information ― commonly, videos of the victims masturbating at their request.
The scammer may even admit the crime to the victim, but then swear he has actually fallen in love with her. Those who believe the excuses and stay involved may enter into a new level of danger as the scammer begins to groom them to launder stolen money, deliver drugs or scam others. They may also threaten to release those “sex tapes” to gain their victims’ cooperation. More than one woman has wound up charged with crimes.
Victims live around the globe. HuffPost spoke to women in Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Kenya, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States who had been scammed.
Ruth Grover, who lives in northeast England, runs ScamHaters, a website that posts warnings about online profiles that appear to be scammers. She said that currently women in the Philippines seem to be prime targets, although she doesn’t know why. Many victims there and elsewhere are not wealthy and must borrow the money they send to the scammers.
“We warn a lot of women,” Grover said of her 14-month-old site’s nearly 5,000 posts.
The Most Likely Scammers
Currently, the vast majority of online romance scams aimed at the U.S. originate in Ghana and Nigeria, Beining said, although they’re increasingly coming from within West African expatriate communities in Malaysia, Canada and Britain. In fast-developing parts of the world with high unemployment and postcolonial legacies of political instability and corruption, young men and women may turn to “the 419 game,” a common term for fraud that refers to the Nigerian criminal code.
Nigerian scammers are dubbed “Yahoo boys” because of their onetime fondness for using Yahoo email accounts (many have now switched to Gmail). In Ghana, they’re known as Sakawa Boys, “sakawa” being a Ghanaian term for internet fraud.
While Nigerian scams targeting an international audience in particular predate the internet, as The Guardian reported in January, the advent of social networks and email has broadened the potential victim list and changed the game.
These scammers are not just young people set on a career criminal path. Some are students ― one 2006 study suggested as many as 80 percent ― looking for cash. “Many undergraduates in Nigerian universities have embraced internet fraud as a way of life,” wrote researchers Oludayo Tade and Ibrahim Aliyu of Nigeria’s University of Ibadan. Poverty is certainly a factor; almost half of the 10 million graduates from more than 668 African universities each year can’t find a job.
What’s more, cybercrime can carry a certain cachet in West Africa, according to a research report by Interpol and TrendMicro ― especially when the victims are foreigners. The image of the successful scammer ― who owns expensive cars and multiple houses, sports flashy jewelry and earns the admiration of younger wannabes ― has been etched into Nigerian culture by popular songs and YouTube videos. In his 2007 song “Yahooze,” Nigerian singer Olu Maintain appears to glorify the Yahoo boys’ lavish lifestyle ― although he has denied that was his intent. The video shows luxury cars bearing license plates for each day of the week, beautiful women and expensive liquor on tap, and dollars carelessly tossed on the floor like confetti.
That image is light-years away from the typical standard of living in Nigeria, where the average annual salary is about $3,600 ― roughly $10 a day. Many of the early online scams were run out of pay-per-hour internet cafes, some of which would even shut down to the public while the larger scamming operations took over. With better and cheaper internet connections these days, scammers can often work from home.
Many of these cybercriminals believe the use of “spiritual elements” in conjunction with their internet surfing will increase their chances of success, a 2013 research paper that looked at Nigerian cybercrime explained. They cast a Vodun spell, which is akin to voodoo, to essentially hypnotize their victims into giving up the money. In some cases, this means wearing a “charmed ring” on the right index finger ― the one that hits the enter key to send messages ― and licking a “black powdery substance mixed with honey” before speaking to “maga” (fools) on the phone, according to The Guardian, a Nigerian newspaper, and a 2011 research paper on Ghanian media depictions of occult rituals involved in cyberfraud.
Whatever the power Vodun actually exercises, virtually every expert who spoke to HuffPost for this story noted that many victims seem to fall under the scammer’s spell. When the scam is over, the victims still can’t believe the romance wasn’t real.
Doug Shadel, head of AARP’s fraud watch team and state director of AARP Washington, said the scammers seek to get the victim “under the ether,” so that “the thinking part of their brain just goes numb.” He interviewed a woman scammed out of more than $300,000, who described the experience like this: “I felt like something ― a power outside my control ― took over my body.”
How victims respond after learning that they’ve been scammed ― when they continue to desire the men who they understand are not actually real ― is “certainly not rational,” Shadel told HuffPost. “But then again, the whole transaction is pretty irrational when you think about it.”
How The Scam Unfolds
While the scam story lines vary in detail, they all tend to follow the same trajectory: The victim is identified; a close relationship is rapidly established online; a small amount of money is asked for ― perhaps for a child’s birthday gift ― to test the victim’s readiness; a crisis occurs and a larger amount of money is sought with the promise of it being returned quickly; a series of additional “bleeds” occur until the scammer is exposed or the victim can’t get any more money.
Scammers often work in teams of five or six, with each member playing a specific role, according to experts who study and prosecute online fraud. One person opens communication as the faux lover. Teammates sometimes impersonate a doctor or a nurse demanding to be paid after a medical emergency. Or they pose as work associates or friends of the paramour, to whom the victim can send the money. Young women pretend to be teenage daughters, eager to call the victim “Mom.” If the victim gets suspicious, an accomplice may reach out pretending to be a private investigator offering to track down the scammer for a fee.
It is all scripted: the words the faux lover uses, the love poetry he plagiarizes, the events that unfold in the “relationship.”
One scammer managed a workload of 25 cases at once, impersonating both men and women, according to AARP’s Shadel.
The criminals can download their scripts off plenty of online sites. Last year, a 55-year-old British woman was sentenced to two years in prison for being a scriptwriter for romance scammers. One script she wrote tried to capitalize on an American tragedy. The scammer was supposed to say: “I am a widow. Lost my husband to 9/11 terror attacks in New York. He made it out of the collapsed building but he later died because of heavy dust and smoke and he was asthmatic.”
Even with a script, there can be warning signs for the victims. Sometimes, the scammer may “forget” what was discussed previously or call the victim by a different name. Most scammers go with the generic “honey” or “babe” to avoid the latter mistake.
When the victim seeks a face-to-face meeting, the script offers creative ways for scammers to say no or to cancel later. Some claim they’re working overseas or on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, where internet and cell phone service is spotty so they can’t stay in contact as frequently as they would like.
These Men Are Collateral Damage
To build their false identities, scammers steal a real person’s photos from dating sites, Facebook or even old MySpace accounts. Sometimes thousands of phony online identities are created from one set of stolen photos. The person whose pictures are taken has no idea anything is amiss until victims start to contact them hoping to get their money back or continue the “romance.”
Member of the military are big targets because women gravitate to photos of strong men willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Soldiers represent protection, another appealing trait. Plus, being “deployed overseas” provides scammers with a great cover for erratic communications and no face-to-face meetings.
The Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) receives hundreds of complaints a month from victims who say they formed an online relationship with someone claiming to be a U.S. soldier. The fake soldier asked them for money to cover needed costs such as transportation, “communication fees,” marriage licenses and medical care. (There are no circumstances in which a member of the U.S. military would legitimately ask a civilian to pay for transportation, medical care or administrative fees.)
“I get calls every week and it is very troubling to hear these stories over and over again of people who have sent thousands of dollars to someone they have never met and sometimes have never even spoken to on the phone,” said Army CID spokesman Chris Grey in a press release.
When it comes to photo theft, rank offers no privileges. John F. Campbell was the top U.S. general in Afghanistan when his photos were stolen. Campbell, now retired, took to Facebook to warn people after he and his staff uncovered more than 700 fake profiles using his image in the first six months after he took over the U.S. military command in Kabul.
He wrote: “I am happily married and my wife Ann is very much alive and my children do not need money for any medical procedures. I DO NOT use any dating sites, Skype, Google plus, Yahoo messenger or any other account.”
Of course, men who are drawn into these scams come from many walks of life. In the case of Dr. Steve G. Jones, a clinical hypnotherapist based in New York, the scammers didn’t just use his photos; they began to pose as him.
About three years ago, Jones began receiving emails from angry women “asking me why I had left them and what I did with the money,” he told HuffPost. He said he still receives “5 to 10 notifications a day” between Facebook messages and people emailing his customer service department. A good part of his life is spent dodging these heartbroken women, some of whom who think he personally ripped them off. “Most of the ladies are frantically attempting to ‘reconnect’ with ‘me,’” he said.
One woman made an appointment for hypnosis with his New York office. She showed up with color printouts of his photos that she believed he had sent her.
“I told her that she is just one of the many victims and she should contact the police, not me,” Jones said. That didn’t go over well with the woman, who insisted the two of them had a romantic relationship that she wanted to continue. She left upset, but still sent him a silver money clip from Tiffany engraved with the word “Dreamy” ― her nickname for the man she believed was him.
When Jones posted on his real Facebook page that HuffPost wanted to speak with women who had been bilked by scammers using his name, more than 50 responded in less than 24 hours. About half indicated that they are still in love with “him.” One woman from Russia sent beseeching requests to HuffPost asking that we convince Jones to respond to her messages.
“It’s like that every day,” Jones said, when told about it. “There is not much I know to do.”
Jones has created a Facebook group dedicated to those victims defrauded with his photos. He also posted this public service announcement on YouTube about how to avoid being scammed.
The Facebook photos of Las Vegas resident Michael Besson were also stolen and used to create hundreds of fake profiles on Facebook and other sites.
“This week I already have eight women who have contacted me, who fell in love with some version of me on Facebook. Trust me when I tell you, this is an insanely huge problem that Facebook is just not owning,” he told HuffPost.
One woman from a small town in Illinois showed up at the door of his home, he said.
“[Scam victims] have a very weird after-effect experience where they still think they’re in love with you. ... And yes, that’s after they realize you’re not the same person. It’s almost like it doesn’t even matter,” Besson said.
He said his motive in speaking publicly was simple: “I hope my name is in the article somehow so Facebook feels the pressure to turn back on the facial recognition warning system that they have.”
The social network giant has facial recognition software that could help identify fraudulent photo use. “They turned it on for me for about six months and during that time, every fake Facebook page that came up was caught within five minutes,” Besson said. And then, it was turned off ― he said he doesn’t know why.
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment on Besson’s case.
Scammers Play In Social Media
Social media and dating sites, where people volunteer details about their personal lives, are a natural habitat for scammers.
Dating sites appear to be aware of the role they play, however unintentionally, in romance fraud. It is standard for such sites to disclaim any responsibility for fake profiles that appear. An industry executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told HuffPost that some sites fight back surreptitiously. They block users who they suspect are scammers without telling them. They create a “simulated user experience” by letting the scammers think they’re messaging people who simply don’t respond. Any money paid is returned on the back end to the (presumably stolen) credit card.
Whitty, the cyberpsychologist, had strong words for the online dating industry in her 2012 report about romance scams, calling on sites to post warnings and educate users about what to look for ― and not to be concerned about scaring users off. “Clients need to be made fully aware of this scam before they start using online dating sites,” she said. “We learnt ... that being scammed did not stop victims from wanting to use online dating sites, but they did stop using the one they were scammed on. ... Victims need to be told: If the person is not willing to meet them in the first month, move on to find someone who will!”
Some sites do a better job of actively monitoring for fraudulent activity. Zoosk, a dating app with 40 million online profiles and members in 80 countries, lets users make a video of their face with the app that a human moderator will then view and match up with the submitted photos. But scammers can still hide among the majority of members who don’t use that option ― just 7 million to date have made the effort.
“They want a breezy experience,” Zoosk spokesman Daniel Mori said. “They want to meet people and to date fast.” The challenge, he said, is to keep the “ecosystem as clean as possible without asking customers to work too hard.”
Facebook, the largest social network by magnitudes, is also a playground for scammers. Many scam victims told HuffPost that they feel Facebook is not sufficiently proactive when it comes to weeding out and blocking the fraudsters.
Facebook spokesman Pete Voss said the site “recognize[s] the risk of malicious actors seeking to mislead people, and for our part, we are taking a multifaceted approach to help mitigate these risks.”
The company has a “combination of automated and manual systems to block accounts used for fraudulent purposes, and we are constantly improving these systems to help us better identify suspicious behavior,” Voss added. “Our security systems run in the background millions of times per second to help catch threats and remove them, and we prevent large numbers of account compromises every day.”
Facebook declined to give any details about its risk mitigation systems or say how many compromised accounts are caught. The site asks users to report posts or messages that ask them to inappropriately share personal information or send money. Voss declined to discuss how many reports it receives.
The issue of what responsibility social networks, including Facebook, bear for enabling scammers is one that troubles many victims. Grover, of ScamHaters, thinks that Facebook could be more cooperative in policing its site. She said that the social giant sometimes shuts down victim advocacy pages ― which often post photos of alleged scammers ― yet leaves up pages for financial middlemen even when they are “happily peddling crime.”
“We shouldn’t be having to fight Facebook harder than scammers,” Grover said.
Facebook declined to respond to questions regarding its general criteria for removing pages or why it has taken down some specific sites, but individuals do appear to be using the site to facilitate financial scams.
HuffPost found this public Facebook group ― where people appear to be trafficking in credit card and bank account numbers ― on June 7. It had grown to almost 1,000 members over the course of several hours. When it was reported, Facebook took it down.
But as soon as one page is removed, another seems to replace it. HuffPost also found this page called Yahoo Boys, which Facebook has since removed. Fraud expert and educator William Kresse said he was “99.99 percent sure that the guy here is advertising himself as dealing in stolen personal financial information.”
Financial journalist Rodney Hobson, author of The Book of Scams, concurred. It “looks pretty blatant to me and if the site was removed after a short time, that is a classic sign,” he told HuffPost.
The criminal exchange of bank and credit card details usually takes place on the Dark Web, Hobson said, where the authorities won’t see. But, he noted, sometimes it is done more openly.
“Typically a website will last just a few minutes and then be taken down before the authorities can spot it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if the fraudster fails to sell the details immediately because they can easily set up a new website and try again.”
Hobson compared the internet to the “Wild West” and argued that “neither the police or the internet giants such as Google have committed the resources to tackle cybercrime.”
HuffPost also found five active Facebook profiles using different names but displaying the same photos. Two of the five were taken down before we could screenshot them; here are the three that remained. Scam victim sites suggested that the man in the photo is actually a singer in the U.K. and that the images were surely stolen.
Facebook declined to comment on the specifics of these screenshots. In the case of the top one, where WhatsApp account numbers are visible and appear to be used for the buying and selling of stolen financial data, Facebook ― which owns WhatsApp ― would not respond to questions about whether it turned this information over to police, removed the profiles of the posters, or even notified WhatsApp that some of its accounts may be being used in what appear to be illegal activities.
When pressed for additional ways that Facebook proactively prevents the network from being used by scammers, Voss said, “We’re always looking for irregularities in how different pages and domains behave on Facebook. For example, when someone receives a friend request, our systems are designed to check whether the recipient already has a friend with the same name, along with a variety of other factors that help us determine if an interaction is legitimate. It’s an area we’re continually working to improve so that we can provide a safe and secure experience on Facebook.”
He also pointed to the site’s public information page about scams, in particular romance scams.
The FBI said it does not comment on the policies and practices of private companies, and a Justice Department spokesman said that as a matter of policy, it would not publicly discuss prosecution strategies.
Jones, the hypnotherapist whose photos are regularly lifted from Facebook, argues however that if the site really tried, it could quash the problem entirely.
“It may be a case of ignorance,” he told HuffPost. “If Facebook really knew the devastation that is going on ― these ladies being scammed out of who knows how much money annually, globally ― I think they would have this fixed by tomorrow.”
But Phil Tully, a senior data scientist for the social media and digital security group ZeroFox, said it’s impossible for a social media site to detect every scammer because both the tactics and scammers change so frequently. He thinks that the large sites have programs in place that thwart scams pre-emptively and thus reduce the risk to users. Still, ZeroFox conducted a study of money scams on Instagram last year and found that scams were being created at an estimated rate three times higher than the rate at which they were being taken down.
Tech Helps The Wary Scammer
Once they’ve found their victims, scammers can take apps and other digital tools designed to shield the public’s privacy and security and use them as protection against being caught.
Every digital device connected to the internet has an Internet Protocol address, a unique set of numbers that reveals, among other information, the country in which it is connected. Anyone can check an IP address, though some browser extensions will send an alert if someone is doing that. So savvy scammers use a virtual private network to hide their IP addresses.
Scammers like to move their conversation with their victims off Facebook or online dating services and onto other messaging platforms where, unbeknownst to their victims, they can organize all their communications. According to ScamHaters’ Grover and law enforcement authorities, scammers prefer apps such as Viber, WhatsApp and Kik.
Leaving Facebook as soon as possible also protects the scammer from the risk that their fake profile may be reported and taken down. If that happens, Grover said, the scammer may explain it away to the victim by saying he was hacked or his company’s “security department” forced him to take it down. “But if they still have all their victims on Kik, they haven’t lost them,” said Grover.
Scammers never want to appear on camera in a live video chat, but will sometimes send a prerecorded video that shows what a loving dad they are or how handsome they look captaining their sailboat. (Obviously, these videos are stolen, too.) Sites like Manycam.com allow prerecorded videos to be played on live webcams. There are multiple YouTube videos on how to do it. And it adds one more layer of believability to the scam, said the FBI’s Beining.
Virtual Cam Whores, a service that creates customizable video, can also add a layer of authenticity. A user can manipulate the on-camera avatar so that the image on the other person’s screen appears to be responding to what that person is saying. For example, if the victim asks for a kiss, the scammer can command the image on the screen to blow a kiss.
Still, some would argue, how can so many people mistake what is a prerecorded video for a live webcam? The answer is as nontechnological as it gets: Victims must be willing to suspend disbelief.
Moving The Money
Criminals have also used the services of pre-digital age businesses to help their scams flourish. Western Union, for example, was a boon to scammers because it didn’t reliably require identification when money was picked up at its offices, particularly in the developing world.
In January, Western Union agreed to pay $586 million to settle federal charges that fraudulent payments involving a range of scams, including online romances, flowed through its money transfer system for years and that the company knew about and could have prevented those payments ― but didn’t. Western Union employees have even been accused of knowingly participating in those scams. In 2012, the FTC found that a mere 137 of Mexico’s 17,710 Western Union locations accounted for more than 80 percent of reported fraud involving Western Union transfers in that country.
The terms of the settlement with the FTC, the Justice Department and several U.S. attorneys’ offices require Western Union to pay back certain people who were scammed out of money in transfers the company handled from Jan. 1, 2004, to Jan. 19, 2017. The Justice Department will handle the returning of money. The process for filing a claim has not yet been established.
A statement about the settlement on the Western Union website notes that the company has, over the past five years, increased its overall compliance funding by more than 200 percent and now spends approximately $200 million per year on employee training and security measures.
The Mysteries Of Love
The big head-scratcher in romance scams comes when you try to understand the victims’ thinking ― in particular those who still profess their love for the man who they know scammed them. They essentially fell in love with a photo and turned a blind eye to their own doubts and suspicions, many told HuffPost. They ignored obvious red flags: spelling and grammatical mistakes from allegedly native English speakers, the rush to declare love sight unseen, the repeated requests for money that was never paid back.
Victims believe because they want to believe, experts said.
A 2009 study in the U.K. found that in general, romance scam victims are not poor decision-makers. They may have successful business or professional careers. But the study said they tend to be unduly open to persuasion by others and less able to control their emotions.
Whitty, the cyberpsychologist, found that many victims were survivors of abusive relationships. When the person who earlier mistreated them was too important to give up ― say, a parent ― they learned how to go into denial mode. To preserve the relationship, they became good at explaining away, or simply refusing to remember, the actions that hurt them.
“No one is immune to being scammed. We need to be on our guard both for ourselves and for our friends and family.”
- Stephen Lea, psychology professor at the University of Exeter
This ability to suspend disbelief is one reason that con artists prefer to focus on people who have fallen for scams in the past. Rather than becoming more guarded, a surprising number of people who have been defrauded before seem to have merely proved their own “scam-ability.”
“No one is immune to being scammed,” psychology professor Stephen Lea of the University of Exeter, who led the research team on the 2009 study, said at the time. “We need to be on our guard both for ourselves and for our friends and family. If you have any worries that something might be a scam … it very likely is.”
The subjects of romance scams are often blamed for their own victimization. They may appear foolish and even culpable ― willing participants who bear at least some responsibility for their losses. All the warnings were there, they’re told, and they chose not to heed them.
Indeed, Dr. Cassandra Cross, who has studied the impact on romance scam victims, noted in a 2016 paper that they are “rarely afforded ideal victim status.” This kind of fraud is “unique,” she wrote, in that there is always “communication between the victim and offender,” and the victims “willingly … albeit under false pretences” send their abusers money and share personal information.
“Victims of fraud are seen to actively violate the notion of an ideal victim and hence, are typically understood as blameworthy and culpable for their own victimisation,” Cross wrote. But she added, “Do not confuse the word ‘typically’ in the last sentence with ‘correctly.’”
The victim-blaming is something that needs to change, said Jan Marshall of Australia, a victim herself who now advocates for others through her website Romance Scam Survivor. Nobody signs up to be preyed upon.
Scam Victims Fight Back
The damage to victims of online fraud, including romance scams, isn’t limited to the money they lost. There is a small body of research indicating that fraud victims experience post-traumatic stress disorder on par with those who have suffered from violent crime. They develop depression and psychological trauma. Some have attempted or died by suicide.
And some get angry enough at having been scammed that they fight back. The internet is ripe with scam-catchers hoping to educate the public about the dangers out there and spare others from being victimized.
The website RomanceScam.com, for example, publishes links to various fake identities that scammers appear to be using. “The best weapon against this crime is education,” the site states. “The more people that are educated in the way the scams work, the harder it is for the scammers to make money and the more scammers that can be put out of business.”
Some former victims find empowerment in scam-baiting, a practice in which they lure scammers and then play along as if they were being fooled. One person, posting anonymously on RomanceScam, wrote that she baits to “waste their time,” because the hours that the scammer spends with her keeps him away from another victim. She called it “soul satisfying” and said she enjoyed watching the scammer get mad and thrown off his game.
419Eater, which calls itself the largest scam-baiting site, encourages scam-baiters to share their victories and stay up-to-date on the latest scams. It has an active forum where baiters can swap stories, and it has been recommended on Facebook more than 18,000 times.
Sometimes He Gets Caught
This past February, a federal judge in Illinois handed down a 27-year sentence to Nigerian national Olayinka Ilumsa Sunmola, a 33-year-old scam boss based in South Africa, for his role in multiple international romance scams from 2007 to 2014. Sunmola and his crew had concocted fictitious online profiles on popular dating websites ― most notably, Match.com ― to lure unsuspecting women, said a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Illinois.
After he was indicted in the U.S., Sunmola was arrested by Scotland Yard as he was about to board a plane from London to Johannesburg, South Africa. He pleaded guilty to all eight counts of the indictment on March 2, 2016, following two days of trial.
The government has no way of knowing how much money Sunmola and his associates ultimately stole, the U.S. attorney’s office said, but victims who stepped forwarded reported losses totaling more than $1.7 million – a sum that Sunmola was ordered to pay in restitution. He owned at least four homes in South Africa that were sold so he could pay his victims.
His crimes forced at least three women to file for bankruptcy. Several more lost their jobs and their homes and were left in financial ruin. One victim who testified at the trial lost over $90,000.
“Retirement should be a happy time,” she wrote to the court. “Instead, I am stressed and broke and working part time jobs at $10 an hour to supplement my income.”
Sunmola’s victims suffered emotionally and psychologically. A few had even purchased wedding dresses. Two told the court they had seriously contemplated killing themselves.
For at least two of the women, the abuse was sexual as well: Sunmola stole pictures of their naked bodies that he used to extort money from them and then posted those images online for anyone to see, said the U.S. attorney’s office.
Whitty testified that the victims had suffered severe psychological damage.
“They’ve in many ways experienced potentially permanent, life-altering changes in their lives. The long-term effects remain, years and years later,” she told the court.
Perhaps what they say is true: Love is the strongest drug.
If you think you have been or are being scammed, you can send your complaint to the FBI. For emotional support, try the Justice Department’s Directory of Crime Victim Services.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story said Nigerian scamming networks did much of their work out of internet cafes due to the high cost of online connections. In fact, the price of internet connections has dropped in more recent years, allowing the scammers’ work to become less centralized.
Language has been updated to note that several federal agencies were involved in the Western Union settlement.