Helping your loved ones
1. Your loved ones will be at various stages of the scam. Depending on where they are on their journey will ultimately dictate how hard this will be to pull them out of it. Please understand that these scammers are professionals and victims go through very powerful emotional and psychological manipulation for the scammers to be able to exploit them.
2. Never be angry or blame them. You are in danger of pushing them closer to the scammer who will have already tried to isolate them. If they feel at all threatened they will not be open to listen. It’s best to lead them to the truth, planting seeds of doubt to grow, not tell them they are wrong.
3. Show them posts from our website and community pages or sister site LoveSaid to explain things that may have convinced them the person is real, such as ‘Fake Video Calls‘ where victims are convinced that they have seen the real person from the pictures on a live video call, deep fake video calls can be seen here. Scammers go to great lengths, creating fake identity documents, photoshopping images as per a request, creating fake websites etc to back up their lies.
4. Victims will have been surrounded with a fake reality, being introduced to friends, children, lawyers, business associates etc as a way to keep the victim busy, isolated and also to be able to bombard them with messages at a time that the scammer attempts to exploit money, creating worry, fear and emergency to send funds.
5. Sometimes the truth is easier coming from an organisation like ours. Family relationships and friendships can be tested when these kinds of frauds are in action. Remember this isn’t personal. The scammers will have been eating away at those relationships and feeding negative thoughts as a way to convince them it’s just the 2 of them that are important. The scammer wants the victim to believe that you are the bad guys with an ulterior motive.
6. We can sometimes create a location link which gives an approximate area of the device being used to communicate. The scammers have to click the link which takes them to a chosen website or similar. This can often help with understanding.