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Internet Dating Scams Target Older American Women
HughPickens.com writes: The NYT reports: "Janet N. Cook, a church secretary in Virginia, had been a widow for a decade when she joined an Internet dating site and was quickly overcome by a rush of emails, phone calls and plans for a face-to-face visit. "I'm not stupid, but I was totally naïve," says Cook, now 76, who was swept off her feet by a man who called himself Kelvin Wells and described himself as a middle-aged German businessman looking for someone "confident" and "outspoken" to travel with him to places like Italy, his "dream destination." But very soon he began describing various troubles, including being hospitalized in Ghana, where he had gone on business, and asked Cook to bail him out. In all, she sent him nearly $300,000, as he apparently followed a well-honed script that online criminals use to bilk members of dating sites out of tens of millions of dollars a year."
According to the Times internet scammers are targeting women in their 50s and 60s, often retired and living alone, who say that the email and phone wooing forms a bond that may not be physical but that is intense and enveloping. Between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2014, nearly 6,000 people registered complaints of such confidence fraud with losses of $82.3 million, according to the federal Internet Crime Complaint Center. Older people are ideal targets because they often have accumulated savings over a lifetime, own their homes and are susceptible to being deceived by someone intent on fraud. The digital version of the romance con is now sufficiently widespread that AARP's Fraud Watch Network has urged online dating sites to institute more safeguards to protect against such fraud. The AARP network recommends that dating site members use Google's "search by image" to see if the suitor's picture appears on other sites with different names. If an email from "a potential suitor seems suspicious, cut and paste it into Google and see if the words pop up on any romance scam sites," the network advised. The website romancescams.org lists red flags to look for to identify such predators, who urgently appeal to victims for money to cover financial setbacks like unexpected fines, money lost to robbery or unpaid wages. Most victims say they are embarrassed to admit what happened, and they fear that revealing it will bring derision from their family and friends, who will question their judgment and even their ability to handle their own financial affairs."It makes me sound so stupid, but he would be calling me in the evening and at night. It felt so real. We had plans to go to the Bahamas and to Bermuda together," says Louise Brown. "When I found out it was a scam, I felt so betrayed. I kept it secret from my family for two years, but it's an awful thing to carry around. But later I sent him a message and said I forgave him."
According to the Times internet scammers are targeting women in their 50s and 60s, often retired and living alone, who say that the email and phone wooing forms a bond that may not be physical but that is intense and enveloping. Between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2014, nearly 6,000 people registered complaints of such confidence fraud with losses of $82.3 million, according to the federal Internet Crime Complaint Center. Older people are ideal targets because they often have accumulated savings over a lifetime, own their homes and are susceptible to being deceived by someone intent on fraud. The digital version of the romance con is now sufficiently widespread that AARP's Fraud Watch Network has urged online dating sites to institute more safeguards to protect against such fraud. The AARP network recommends that dating site members use Google's "search by image" to see if the suitor's picture appears on other sites with different names. If an email from "a potential suitor seems suspicious, cut and paste it into Google and see if the words pop up on any romance scam sites," the network advised. The website romancescams.org lists red flags to look for to identify such predators, who urgently appeal to victims for money to cover financial setbacks like unexpected fines, money lost to robbery or unpaid wages. Most victims say they are embarrassed to admit what happened, and they fear that revealing it will bring derision from their family and friends, who will question their judgment and even their ability to handle their own financial affairs."It makes me sound so stupid, but he would be calling me in the evening and at night. It felt so real. We had plans to go to the Bahamas and to Bermuda together," says Louise Brown. "When I found out it was a scam, I felt so betrayed. I kept it secret from my family for two years, but it's an awful thing to carry around. But later I sent him a message and said I forgave him."
While it is not nice, I have to completely agree. This person has lost all reason and all understanding of context there. That is rightfully called "stupid".
This is not a problem the dating-sites can fix. Stupidity carries a price, sometimes a high one. And there is no way to protect those suffering from it except by removing their freedom to act as they see fit. That is of course completely unacceptable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Naive is believing that a German businessman who travels to locales like Ghana would describe traveling to Italy as his dream destination, like it's something to aspire to as an adventure, when it's about like driving from Florida to Pennsylvania in distance. Stupid is when you believe that this man could rack up a bill in Ghana that would be a major medical scandal in the US (where hospitals don't even blink at bilking people in many areas) and then blindly start throwing that much money at him.
I speculate that a few factors combine to make them more susceptible:
1) Age-related cognitive decline. It is a realty, and one well-worth hating. People who experience this often don't realize it (they aren't in a position to be objective about it), and have some pride blocking them from admitting it (after all, they have a lot of success showing just how smart they are!).
2) Lonliness. The young-and-attractive simply do not experience this like the elderly do. Even people who have spent their lives single, by their own choice, have enough social interaction with the other gender to not really feel the sting of lonliness. On top of that, the age-related cognitive decline can include the reduction of the neurological barriers that help people turn the volume down on these negative emotions....making them even worse. These emotions don't just feel bad...they are strong enough to hijack the reasoning process, making people cognitively incapable of thinking straight.
3) Existential crisis. We all know we are going to die...but the reality of that is an abstract far-away eventuality for most of our lives. Once you retire, however, and have more time to sit around and think, the reality of this starts really closing in on you. It can create a lot of anxiety and depression, which makes people flail about emotionally...reaching out to anything they can hold on to.
It is easy for us young, socially-involved, job-having types to get derisive when old people do things that are this wildly stupid. It isn't entirely warranted, however, as the brain does wear out eventually....and yours will too.
In the end, most relationships are either scams or based on scams. If you were fully honest during dating, you wouldn't get very far.
People have been married to scam artists, more people than would dare admit. I got married in a whirlwind romance with someone half a world away and divorced 2 years later, in the end all I wonder is whether that person didn't just marry me in order to travel where we decided to live. That or to get away from oppressive religious restrictions on sex.
In the end the only difference is that she never met the guy and/or had sex.
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It may not be as stupid as you think, just naive.
No. Naive would be believing his story in the first place. Stupid is sending him the money. It's just fucking stupid. I can see sending someone a little bit of money, maybe, but not a large amount you can't afford to lose. That is stupid by any rational definition.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem is that at the beginning of senility, when the person is trying to hide it (from themselves as much as anyone), there are no care givers. My Mom managed to go through a few hundred thousand dollars just before she was diagnosed as senile. Where the money went, we don't know though we have suspicions about her neighbour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Keep in mind that in the time period she was raised 'trust' was the default in social interactions. My grandfather ended up financing the stocking of a minimarket and never got a penny back in the 1950s. It wasn't until after that experience that he distrusted people asking for money. If she never got ripped off before her scam-o-meter never got recalibrated. Some of these guys are really good too, and remember how many professional investors get taken each year.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin