There is an eery parallelism between the rise in reported romance scams to the Federal Trade Commission and the onset of the worst phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. See below:
Now, I understand that correlation is not causation. And, no doubt, online dating app use went way up during the pandemic (i.e., driving a natural increase in scams). However, loneliness, isolation, and excessive pandemic months spent on an unregulated internet of desire significantly heightens the risk of a nasty collision between fantasy and interpersonal reality. Right? And the chart above only measures reported scams (more later on this).
Enter the sociopath - a master at decoding your fantasies, preying on them, and inflicting emotional and financial harm without the slightest guilt or regret. He’s a real charmer. Your average American prisoner has more remorse than these folks do.1
What has recently fascinated me as an anthropologist and social observer is how amenable American culture is to sociopaths.2 Our urban culture is so stranger-friendly. Each of us desperately wants to discover that each new stranger is an excellent addition to our personally curated weak-ties club. Americans tend to assume the best about strangers in most places I’ve lived in this country. I never felt this way living in India. Strangers there require a vetted introduction. Otherwise, they often get treated pretty rudely, especially in the streets.
Our very smiley, American stranger-love is the key hook for romance scammers. They can start conversations very easily. Talking is the sociopath’s fuel. Talking is their everything.
Enter the internet. The internet’s sprawl throughout our lives has now had about 30 years to accelerate our ability to meet strangers each week. We can absolutely surf hundreds or thousands of new peeps every week on multiple networked platforms. So many peeps we meet. We are digital extroverts, even when we behave IRL as massively introverted.
How Romance Scammers Enter the Stranger Mix
One of the more succinct narrations of the average romance scam comes from a 2020 academic literature review. Readable English in academic papers is pretty rare, so I will celebrate the original:
The scammer always acts empathetically and attempts to create the impression in the victim that the two are perfectly synced in their shared view of life. The declarations of the scammer become increasingly affectionate and according to some authors, a declaration of love is made within two weeks from initial contact. After this hookup phase, the scammer starts talking about the possibility of actually meeting up, which will be postponed several times due to apparently urgent problems or desperate situations such as accidents, deaths, surgeries or sudden hospitalizations for which the unwitting victim will be manipulated into sending money to cover the momentary emergency. Using the strategy of “testing-the-water”, the scammer asks the victim for small gifts, usually to ensure the continuance of the relationship, such as a webcam, which, if successful, leads to increasingly expensive gifts up to large sums of money.3
Here’s my James-splaining version of the above written as a five-step formula-
Charm the sh*T out of a highly predisposed individual in a state of mutual absence
Tease up the erotic possibility of live mutual presence
Pull back sharply by inserting a problem that delays meeting up and thereby heightens anticipation
Test to see if the target will send a small, highly affordable gift (cash or in-kind) before meeting in person.
If they send the gift, hit the scam gas pedal!
Modern romance scammers do not date you in person…generally.
Why? Well, it’s not because humans can’t romantically scam in person. Sure, they can. This is what sociopaths do all the time in romantic relationships. An excellent documentary of a sociopathic husband and the unwinding of a fairly long marriage is now on Hulu. Our anti-hero, though, is not scamming a recent lover for money. Spencer Herron is just a sociopath who likes to cheat on his wife…without remorse. And it can take a long, long time to out these classic, nonviolent sociopaths until they do something foolish (i.e., sleep with your high school student). The emotional carnage is immense when they do get caught. The clue to Spencer’s sociopathy emerges during recorded phone calls from prison, replayed in the later episodes in which his shallow affect and total lack of remorse are striking.
Who Falls For the Small Gift Test?
One British study has gone the farthest to test what might drive individuals to fall for internet romance scammers. The authors’ primary conclusion is that a high level of commitment to romantic beliefs statistically predicts vulnerability to getting financially scammed on dating apps.4
In other words, the most romantic among us are most at risk. What does this mean?
People with a highly romantic view of love believe that their love will be perfect and that each of us has one true love.5
So this means that folks get into trouble right away in the five-step scammer formula without meeting in person (which most of these scammers apparently won’t do because they’re not even close to local).
The research is far from perfect because almost all of it restricts itself to deploying psychological profiling batteries on survey instruments without sociologically profiling respondents. We also don’t know their dating histories, dating patterns, contextual beliefs, etc. The state of the research is solidly incomplete.
In the absence of great research, I would suggest some cultural and sociological forces that set up highly romantic people hellbent on the perfect love with “the One” to be scammed:
Baseline romantic ideals are highly perfectionist in the West, especially in countries with loads of romance-heavy media. We idealize romance in America like no other culture I’ve studied or lived in. This idealization connects directly to our growth-oriented economy and constant fussing for maximum happiness and contentment. We set expectations that are probably too high for us to meet…long-term. We have forgotten the tragic view of humanity central to the Puritan, Mennonite, and Calvinist sects that settled the northern colonies early on. Who were these people, again?
Lifestyle fragmentation in the past half-century has made it harder for individuals to ‘connect’ as easily with random strangers on dates. We have more perceived reasons to be turned off or disconnected from people we date. This has probably made the ‘perfect love’ seem more elusive, rare, and coveted. It’s also possible that the modern concept of a ‘perfect love’ is the result of too much dating, higher amounts of lifetime sexual partners, too much sexual experience, and too many perceived alternatives compared to that old New England Puritan village. My theory here is based on the idea that if you are highly active in a consumption domain, you probably fuss and chase very high standards.
Romance is a linguistic experience for most of us, a mutual conversational exchange that women favor in America. Since women are known to be much more cautious across cultures when picking a heterosexual mate, they want multiple conversations before locking in a dating choice (oxytocin bonding before dopamine sex). They generally want to have sex with men they love romantically (and recent research on hookup culture says they are more sexually satisfied in committed relationships).6 The length of time before having sex with a new person may have shortened a lot since the 1950s, but not to five minutes. Certainly, not if romance was the woman’s objective. Men, however, are not nearly as picky. They tend to fall in love with someone they’re having sex with. The physical intimacy is enough for many men. However, this gendered choosiness of heterosexual women sadly favors sociopathic men who simply learn exactly what to say to women to trigger a romantic feeling and deploy it like a magic spell that accelerates the journey to sex in what the woman now thinks is a committed relationship. A recent Ryan Gosling/Emma Stone rom-com put this male gaming of romance to the test in one scene that infuriates many women and many introverted men (who can’t pull it off). Check out 03:21 of this clip from Crazy Stupid Love.
Romantic perfectionism is a middle-class luxury. Romantic relationships among lower SES couples have much bigger challenges that take priority over a search for the “perfect” love (lack of men with stable incomes, lots of partner abuse, high levels of substance addiction). Here’s an excellent discussion of how class shifts a person’s prioritization of romance in relationships:
College-educated individuals can take many things for granted: their partners are likely to be employed and relatively unlikely to be incarcerated, addicted, or abusive. With their material needs satisfied, these fortunate individuals are free to prioritize emotional connection with their romantic partners, and to end their relationships when their expectations for connection are not met. Individuals who did not complete college also value and aspire to emotional connections with their partners, but they simultaneously have more salient concerns. They cannot take for granted that their partners will participate in child-rearing, refrain from antisocial behaviors, or contribute to their household income.7
The most perfectionist middle-class romantics will tend to get caught up in romance scams the most. Sadly, our culture of hyper-idealism lays a cognitive trap for them. I would add that an undue amount of fantasy is injected into everyone’s ideas of romantic satisfaction. And, no, I’m not just a straight man just trying to get myself off the hook. Gulp.
The line between notions of the “one true love” and fantasy is unclear. The latter seems awfully like a fantasy to me. The internet is a dream-like medium with no gatekeeper on our digital wandering, where fantasy roams free much as it did in our pre-internet daydreams. I also suspect that our normalization of meeting people online for work is accelerating the vulnerability of everyone to losing sight of the boundary between fantasy and reality as they surf for love. After all, it’s the same screen for the Zoom call or the dating site. You may have Tinder open on a browser tab right next to your work Slack. Dangerous.
But who is most predisposed to have a perfectionist approach to love? My best-educated guess is that it is people who have never had a satisfying relationship in their lives yet. For them, perfection remains elusive. Or, it could simply be folks lost in a constant state of comparing alternatives, something the internet is good at augmenting.
If we step back, though, we need to recognize that a pretty small proportion of internet daters fall into the trap. As of 2022, only 9% of adults report using dating sites (at least once during the year).8 So, out of 23 million internet daters that year, only 20,000 reported a romance scam (i.e., that cost them enough money to file an FTC report). If we loosely assume 90% of the scammed were women, then at least 1 out of ~600 internet daters are getting scammed. So, as much as our culture predisposes some folks, the perfectionist daters, to get scammed, it’s less common than getting audited by the IRS (1 in 200) and much less common than having food poisoning (1 in 6).9
But, 30% of recent internet daters claim they’ve been asked for money.10 The experience of attempted romance scamming is common, which may be the most impactful issue here. Scammers are spraying these sites and reaching mostly unpredisposed people. Nothing necessarily prevents an unpredisposed person from becoming predisposed later on in life. We simply do not understand enough about any of this.
PSA - How to Repel a Romance Scammer
Dating apps and sites are just corporate networks trying to sell people a “romantic outcome” and feed directly into perfectionist fantasies of “the one.” These sites play on notions of premiumization and competitive consumption in our material lives. I think teasing a better chance of ‘marriage’ or ‘optimal romantic relationships’ is pretty irresponsible, given the shallow nature of their matchmaking algorithms. Matching static, claimed personal attributes have no relationship to behavior in a relationship. This is also why resume scanning can not predict job performance.
So, the first rule to avoid getting scammed in love is NOT to use these sites to find love. Sex, maybe, if that’s your thing. But not love. Instead, use them to find an attractive friend. Vastly lower your expectations. And your pace. Only sociopaths want you to combine haste and love. You’ll be easier to manipulate if you’re in a distracted hurry. And if you’ll fall in love through mere digital conversation.
The second rule is for women to immediately suggest an in-person, low-stakes date or just ‘unmatch’ and move on. Get off the app quickly to shed the scammers. You now know the playbook. Scammers won’t invest in a coffee date. It’s not scalable. Digital interaction is NOT a heterosexual relationship. That’s my point. If you’re not physically starting a relationship, just assume it doesn’t exist. Dating app chat conversation, even over days, is the relationship equivalent of a chopped-up, initial IRL chat at a bar. Nothing more.
The third rule is that budding partners give gifts; they don’t ask for financial assistance. If your new date is asking for help, run. Move on.
The fourth rule is that there is no perfect “One.” There are millions of sexual partners with whom most people can form a healthy relationship—thousands in your local area. Early rejection benefits absolutely everyone. So please do it. Without regret. You’ll find other people. Keep moving. Keep meeting in real life.
Look at dating apps as mere tools to generate first dates. Don’t believe their profile-matching nonsense feeding on your romantic fantasies. Ignore and meet people in real life!
Hey! Don’t forget to pre-order my new book! Only two weeks left until release. It will drop into your Kindle at midnight on Saturday, May 17. You can learn more about the book and advanced praise right HERE.
Only 16% of incarcerated and paroled inmates are psychopaths, according to a 2011 study. Kiehl KA, Hoffman MB. THE CRIMINAL PSYCHOPATH: HISTORY, NEUROSCIENCE, TREATMENT, AND ECONOMICS. Jurimetrics. 2011 Summer; 51:355-397. PMID: 24944437; PMCID: PMC4059069. Accessed May 3, 2024 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4059069/#:~:text=And%20of%20the%20approximately%206%2C720%2C000,%2C%20or%201%2C075%2C000%2C%20are%20psychopaths.&text=Thus%2C%20approximately%2093%25%20of%20adult,jail%2C%20parole%2C%20or%20probation.
I define sociopaths loosely as - someone who has zero to no empathy for the harm they cause others and actively enjoys manipulating people as a sort of playful, amusing game. I’ve met these people sporadically throughout my life. A more clinical set of factors used to model this neurological condition include: “shallow affect, lack of empathy, guilt and remorse, irresponsibility, and impulsivity.” Kiehl and Hoffman, The Criminal Psychopath, 2011.
Coluccia A, Pozza A, Ferretti F, Carabellese F, Masti A, Gualtieri G. Online Romance Scams: Relational Dynamics and Psychological Characteristics of the Victims and Scammers. A Scoping Review. Clin Pract Epidemiol Ment Health. 2020 Mar 26;16:24-35. doi: 10.2174/1745017902016010024. PMID: 32508967; PMCID: PMC7254823. Accessed May 3, 2024 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7254823/
Buchanan, Tom and Whitty, Monica T. (2013) The online dating romance scam: causes and consequences of victimhood. Psychology, Crime & Law, 20 (3). pp. 261-283. Accessed May 3, 2024 via https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/83736/7/WRAP_Online%20Dating%20Romance%20Scam%20-%20causes%20and%20consequences%20of%20victimhood.pdf
Gwendolyn Seidman, “Who’s Really More Romantic, Men or Women? Psychology Today, August 25, 2014. Accessed May 3, 2024, via https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/close-encounters/201408/whos-really-more-romantic-men-or-women
ibid.
Karney BR. Socioeconomic Status and Intimate Relationships. Annu Rev Psychol. 2021 Jan 4;72:391-414. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-051920-013658. Epub 2020 Sep 4. PMID: 32886585; PMCID: PMC8179854. Accessed May 3. 2024 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8179854/
Emily Vogels and Colleen McClain, Key Findings About Online Dating in the U.S. February 2, 2023, Pew Research Center. Accessed May 3, 2024 - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-in-the-u-s/#:~:text=Online%20dating%20is%20more%20common,of%20those%2065%20and%20older.
Sources: https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-poisoning, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/08/attention-taxpayers-irs-audits-have-fallen-significantly.html
January 2023 National Ipsos poll of n= 1,000 adults; n= 102 who have used an internet dating app in the past five years. Accessed May 3, 2024 - https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2023-02/Dating%20App%20Scams%20Topline%20013123.pdf
Weak ties- all explained in the book “the WEIRDest People in the World” . WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. Fascinating look at how they were such innovators (because of weak family/kin/clan tie)
Wow. Spot on! You’d broke it down so thoughtfully and accurately. Thank you!