Online dating scammers

What is the appropriate level of sympathy for these victims?

I always go through wildly varied reactions - ‘aww that poor lonely bloke’ through to ‘whst a plonker, be more cynical.’

I dunno, what do you reckon?

I always feel very sorry for them as they’re usually very vulnerable and looking for love/attention :cry:

6 Likes

Yeah but isn’t there any ‘why didn’t you…?’ frustrating questions that conflict with that sympathy.

I’m pretty cynical though, I suppose if you are desperate to believe, you do. Sad.

Yeah, this is pretty horrific stuff. So sad that people get fucked over like this :frowning:

I think you only have to watch one Derran Brown show to realise that you could only possibly be un-scammable by being cynical to the point of sociopathy. There are so many ways to win people’s trust and these are done over time and using very clever methods.

On a similar topic, my wife’s sister called us last week, having just got off the phone with their grandmother. The grandmother was beside herself with excitement because she’d just received a Facebook message saying that Mark Zuckerberg had selected her as a great humanitarian, and wanted to give her $100,000. All she had to do was go to this website and fill out the form to claim the money. Obviously my sister-in-law explained that this was a scam, but it took a while to get it through to her. And the scary thing is, it’s not like her grandma is typically frail and vulnerable. She’s obviously not super web savvy, but she uses Facebook and email, she’s active, very smart, a retired teacher, has investments and shit. Terrifying how easy she was almost conned just because it was somewhat unfamiliar to her. Scammers must make tonnes from stuff like this.

True. You might have a point.

-Thinly veiled calling me a sociopath-

:grin:

Well, I’m not calling you a sociopath, I’m just implying you can probably be scammed but no one’s tried yet. Also, it might not be THIS scam because maybe you are better at finding love/already loved up, I’m not sure.

I’m not feeling so cynical after glimpsing into that valentine’s thread. Wow, you guys are hardcore.

Yeah, anyone can be vulnerable in the right circumstances. My dad is cynical as fuck but still ended up giving a woman at a service station £10 for a cab or something when she had a sob story and he was knackered and it only occurred to him afterwards what had happened.

Aye, maybe I’m just tight. Supposed ‘Long lost school crush’ asks for a score, nae bother.

Anything over £20, don’t kno who u r pal.

I think perhaps i’m incapable of feeling empathy for people, but i honestly don’t know how it gets to the point where someone would hand over their savings to someone online. Unless it was a life or death situation i wouldn’t lend thousands of pounds to a real human i was fully in a relationship with, and i’m not particularly savvy or streetwise, and don’t have loads of offers or a particularly big support network around me and was raised in a shoe and ate coal for breakfast, etc. The ones i do have a lot of sympathy for are those who’ve been intimidated into handing over money, that’s nasty shit and makes me pretty angry, but to me there’s a clear distinction between the two.

2 Likes

There’s a lot of lonely people out there, I’m probably going to reserve my scorn for those who would exploit that.

I don’t even think this is necessarily down to loneliness (although that is how the conversation will get started) - a lot of people will give money if they’re asked to during a conversation. It’s why the bank will try and chat to you if you phone them, or charity people in the street will initiate a conversation as you go past.

People don’t necessarily give/spend money because they want to, it’s because they feel awkward saying no to the request - I don’t think that’s specific to lonely people.

I wonder if it is an age thing. I grew up in the age before social media and would never dream of seriously interacting with someone who I only knew online. I’m happy to talk and sympathise with anyone, but if they are only a stream of words on a computer screen, in some way I do not regard them as ‘real’.

oh definitely but I do think people trying to exploit others on online dating platforms are counting to some degree on the fact that they’re single and to some degree isolated, as otherwise they’d be able to inform others in their social network who, being outside of the situation, would probably have a slightly less subjective take on what was happening.

The example given in that article partly relied on the fact that David didn’t or couldn’t tell anyone about what was happening.

1 Like

I think overall I am hugely sympathetic but feel so frustrated that people would fall for it.

Not in a snobby judgemental way but I don’t like to see people duped by arseholes and a wee part of me wants to be stopping people going over the cliff.

One of our friends was hooked in by one of these dating scams about 12 years ago, and had fallen for it hook, line and sinker. He told us about this stunning new women he was talking to for a few months, and it turned our he had been sending money to this mystery ‘woman’ in Russia for a while. When my wife and I found out about it from him we instantly became suspicious. He had properly fallen in love with her over the course of a few months online, and was sending small but not insignificant amounts of money to her, initially to help her care for her sick mother or buy books and then to get a passport and visa to visit him. It wasn’t massive amounts, just £20 for train fares, £30 for food or £60 for the visa application etc, but I suspect the plan was to build up to bigger amounts.

As soon as he showed us some pictures of his new love it just seemed really dodgy as the photos all looked too posed and stock photo like, but he was understandably really defensive when we said that we had concerns as this fictitious person was someone that he genuinely had fallen in love with and he refused to believe it. This sort of scam was less well known back then I guess but it still seemed to us that everything about her screamed fake, including that fact that we was unable to speak to her on the phone. Eventually, after another mate started badgering him too, he agreed to let me have some of the emails from her when she was proclaiming her undying love for her, and a quick google found the exact same text on a website warning about these scams.

I have to confess we found it all very funny at first because we hadn’t realised that he had properly fallen in love with someone that didn’t exist and didn’t realise he’d be crushed by the revelation. He tried to style it out afterwards with a ridiculous claim about it having all been research for a tv part (he was/is a actor - not a famous one at all but someone who has been in at least a couple of things everyone here will have seen) and said he was in on it all the time, but it did really cut him up. He wouldn’t say how much money he’d sent to get to that point but it I’m guessing nowhere near the amounts in that article, but I’d bet it would still be near a grand or so.

Problem must be pretty widespread especially as so many will keep it to themselves. Scary biscuits.

Was just thinking this. Must be utterly fucking humiliating, gotten quite depressed thinking about it.