Follow up scams come after the original fraud. Sometimes it’s immediate and sometimes it’s years down the line.
The victim at this point is at their most vulnerable. Their world has just fallen from underneath them, they are grieving the loss of an incredibly intense relationship where their reality has been completely distorted, they are realising that the person who claimed to love them and that they loved doesn’t exist. On top of that, they will have been coerced into sending money, through the deceit of the fraud. Their days (and often nights) once filled with communications from the criminals is now a deep void. The thing they want most is for the pain to stop.
There are a few ways that the criminals will try to retain a connection.
The criminal, mainly when challenged because the victim has become aware of the fraud, will declare that they fell in love with the victim while they were scamming them, that they were the first person they had scammed and didn’t realise how it would make them feel or they will say that they didn’t have a choice to do this because of the state of the country and they can’t stand the guilt any longer and want to start fresh being ‘honest’. They will lay on as much of a poor me story as they can to turn any feelings into empathy and guilt for the scammers situation.
The reasons given for scamming in the first place may be one of examples given below (1-3) but these examples, along with the others may also be used as a reason to ask for money should the victim carry on talking to the criminal, now ‘as themselves’.
- They have a sick family member, often their mum, sometimes a sibling who they will say they are responsible for. They will provide scans or x rays of the condition and letters from the doctor. Much like setting the scene and providing proof in other types of romance fraud, just because they are using their own face, doesn’t mean the deceit changes when the ask for money arrives.
- Similar to above, they claim that their father or both parents have died and that they are now solely responsible for the siblings. They will tell you there is no food or schooling which also needs to be paid for and that there is no work.
- They will sometimes talk about new opportunities that have been offered but they don’t have capital to invest.
- They may ask for birthday presents, because it’s normal to send presents to friends.
- They may explain that work voluntarily for an orphanage and wonder if you might donate.
- The ask, as in other scenarios may be for phones or laptops so they can keep in touch with you.
- The biggest ask is likely to be for a visa to come and visit you so that you can get to know each other better so that you can get married. They may invite you out to their home country first to meet the family and that family will be in on the fraud. Sadly, there are huge risks here and it has been known for people who leave for these meetings, do not come home.
Another way these criminals will try to keep the victim in communication, is to request or message with new identities. The fraudsters that have been talking to these victims for some months know A LOT of information about the victim, their day to day activities to their darkest secrets. Other identities (but the same criminals) will have a head start on drawing the victim back in. The victim will be at a point where, if they respond to the message that they couldn’t be so unlucky for this to happen again (not knowing the pattern of behaviour of the criminals).
The criminals will also sell contact information to other criminals, and similar scenarios as above, can occur.
Recovery Scams
These can be attached to the original criminals, criminals that victim contact details have been sold to or stand alone profiles or websites which claim to get funds back or track down the scammers.
Like the name suggests, this fraud is criminals declaring that they can get money back for victims of these frauds. They come in many guises.
- Profiles claiming to be a victim or friends or family of a victim who has a contact that helped get their money back and/or track the scammers
- Profiles claiming to be FBI/Interpol/ActionFraud and similar.
- Profiles claiming to be organisations getting money back or tracking scammers
- ‘Cyberhacker’ recovery accounts who claim to track money and/or regain access to hacked accounts
- Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency recovery profiles
- Websites claiming to track and recover crypto currency or other funds.
The reality is that there are very few legitimate organisations that can trace money and they cannot get the money recovered, they can only pass the trace information to law enforcement, who can then potentially put in requests for any remaining funds to be released.
The only process which can potentially get money recovered are law enforcement and that is a tiny, tiny percentage of cases which are ever taken forward. When taken forward, the likelihood of any funds being left are rare.
Reporting
Reporting however is incredibly important because the real figures of this crime are hugely under reported across the globe (between 5-14%) and this means that figures will not reflect the funding required to help investigate and deal with the criminals. Also, despite the fact that individual cases may not be investigated, the information given in the report, such as bank accounts money has been sent to, help to. build packets of data to pull together larger cases and see trends to better understand the flow of the crime nationally and globally.