> ROMANCE PREDATORS
In the end, Bourgeois may have lost
some of her dignity to Garic, but she
never lent him any money. Others who
have been targeted by romantic predators online have fared much worse. A
friend of Bourgeois lost $20,000 in a
scam to another man who lied about
serving in the military, and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation says that 5,600
people in the U.S. alone reported being
victimized in online romance scams in
2011. They lost an average of $10,000
each, totaling around $50 million.
Romance and fraud have been mingling for ages, of course, and the fact
that Lotharios pull on victim’s heartstrings in order to open their purse
strings is an ancient tale. But the advent of the Internet, and the realities
of our digitally-connected world, make
romantic predators more potent than
ever before, with bags of tricks that
allow them to disguise their location,
HUFFINGTON
06.24.12
their identity and their intentions with
relative ease.
Analysts also have come to understand much more about the victims
themselves as well —and to answering
the question of why a man or a woman
(though most victims are women) would
fork over a significant sum of money in
the earliest stages of a romance to someone they’ve never met before.
While it might be easy to dismiss the
victims as thoughtless, or even dumb,
romance scams aren’t about intelligence: they’re about emotion. And what
experts now know about victims is that
they aren’t simply lonely-hearts. Instead, they tend to have highly idealized
notions of romance and marriage, and
share a basic belief that most people are,
alas, well-intentioned.
When people like this look to the web
for companionship, they form emotional
bonds quickly and with an abandon they
might not demonstrate in the workaday,
offline world.
“People fall in love very quickly online
and form hyper-personal relationships,”
“I cried. I cried Monday.
I cried yesterday. I cried
a little bit today...
He knew exactly what to say
to tug at my heartstrings.”