Rebecca Nicholson - The rise of dating scams reveals our endless capacity to hope
…..there’s an
increasing number of people who make their fortunes out of romantic
racketeering. A report on
the Victoria Derbyshire programme this week revealed that in 2016, £39m was
frittered away on a false promise of love. The UK’s national fraud and cyber
crime reporting centre, Action Fraud, breaks down the figures into more than
350 scams a month, based on the reports it receives. Who knows how many other
people are too ashamed to admit that they have been conned, particularly in an
area so sensitive and fraught as this.
The stories are
novel-worthy concoctions of loneliness and precision opportunism. One woman, a
university professor, told the programme that she had lost £140,000 through a
series of cons, all related to the same man, who first asked for money to
support a business deal in South Africa, and then, in what could be the scene
from a second-rate gangster movie, told her to go to Amsterdam to release money
from a safety deposit box. It had gone so far that there were other people
involved, playing parts of the story necessary to make it seem real. The
average amount gambled away on these imagined futures is £10,000, but some have
lost hundreds of thousands. One cannot begin to imagine the emotional cost.
Recently, a friend
fell victim to an online scam, although not a love scam, after paying a
substantial amount of money for a “bargain” trip of a lifetime, only to see the
so-called holiday firm disappear once the cash had been transferred. It had
seemed perfectly legitimate and above board: not too cheap to be absurd, but
just enough of a deal to seem worth it, with all of the correct window-dressing
to suppress any potential alarm bells. Although not insignificant, the money
lost was not life-ruining, either, but still, it was a crushing experience for
those involved. They worried that if they could fall for this, they might fall
for anything, and felt stupid, and blamed themselves.
When you hear about
these stories of being fooled, who do you blame? Some may feel that the victim
was daft to be tricked in the first place, given the absurdity of some of the
online fictions. It’s understandable and human, but it’s also not fair, and
with time that gut reaction should subside for anyone with even a tiny sliver
of compassion. Hope is open-hearted and loneliness is desperate, and a
combination of these two can widen the cracks in anyone. That instinctive
head-shaking is largely based on a fear that we might one day be swept up in
something similar ourselves. Catfish, the
documentary film that became a TV series, dealt with this kind of trickery
on a weekly basis, where people in different states of the US would be in
years-long online relationships, with supermodels, pop stars, pretty girls and
handsome boys, only to become suspicious about abandoned plans to meet, aborted
phone calls, that feeling that something wasn’t right. But that feeling was
never enough to truly cancel out the hope.
There is an
old episode of the This American Life podcast that emphasises just how
powerful optimism can be. It tells the true story of Don Lowry, who set up a
lonely hearts club business, in which men would pay to receive deeply personal
love letters from women he called “angels”. The women were not real, but the
“relationships” went on for years. Eventually, it grew beyond letters and many
men lost a lot of money to their correspondents. Lowry was charged with mail
fraud, conspiracy and money-laundering and went to prison for 10 years. A lot
of the men who had been defrauded were angry. But incredibly, some defended
Lowry, picketing the courtroom during his trial, even after they had realised
they had spent years pouring their hearts out to him. Because the hope of love
was better than not having love at all.
In the face of just
how ruinous and inhuman love scams must be, how devastating the impact is, that
is the parable I want to remember. Not because the promise of love, no matter
how flimsy, is worth losing your life savings over, but because it shows that
hope, one of the most important currencies we have in this era of alternative
truths, can be so unbreakable that it can face anything, even as these modern
bogeymen and women, who turn daydreams into nightmares, have the audacity to
try to chip away at it.
