> ROMANCE PREDATORS
mer, it was hard to break that, you know,
that love,” she says. “Or what do you call
it, you thought you were in love.”
It took Hansen three months in therapy, and a stay at a mental hospital to
treat her the depression she was dealing
with, to accept that the relationship had
never been real.
Victims can go broke after a scam —
Hansen ended up losing her house to a
short sale after giving most of her savings to pay her predator’s debts and other costs — but those who have worked
with anyone who has been fleeced say
the emotional fallout can be worse than
financial losses.
In Professor Whitty’s interviews with
victims, she found that ties to the scam-
HUFFINGTON
06.24.12
mer are, indeed, hard to break. One
woman she interviewed was so attached
to her scammer that she kept a photo of
him on her iPhone.
“She’d moved on to a new relationship, and the guy was lovely, but she still
compares the real relationship with the
fake relationship,” Whitty says. “She’d
say, ‘He really understood me and my
boyfriend doesn’t.’”
One male victim told Whitty he’d have
been willing to pay to continue the relationship – knowing it was fake and with
a man– just to have that constant source
of happiness back in his life again.
Beyond that, victims deal with their
own shame and embarrassment over
what they’ve done. Karen Hansen found
that even the authorities she reported
the fraud to weren’t sympathetic.
“The police station, they aren’t very
nice to you,” she says. “They don’t understand what you’ve been through.”
If victims do decide to tell their families,
they risk humiliation. When Mary Wheaton told her family what happened, one of
her brothers suggested she go on Dateline.
“He wanted to have me publicly
ridiculed,” she says. “I don’t talk to
very many friends anymore. I don’t really go to family functions.”
When Professor Whitty attended a
conference in Chicago last month to
speak with the major dating sites -Match.com, eHarmony, and Spark Net-