Valentine’s Day isn’t a cause for celebration if you’ve been catfished by a fraudster
Valentine’s Day might be the day of love, but the picture is not that rosy for everyone. Victims of romance fraud still get victim-blamed by the authorities, and it’s unfair, writes Rosie Beacon
As millions of couples who met online are no doubt celebrating Valentine’s Day this week, I can’t help but spare a thought for the 8,624 people who have experienced romance fraud this year.
The framing of fraud, and especially romance fraud, is increasingly problematic. In reality, it is a shameless exploitation of intimacy, but is often perceived to be a half crime where the irresponsibility of the victim takes precedence over the exploitation.
The lack of attention given to romance fraud points directly at a wider issue – that fraud is still considered an unserious crime, and as a result, our systems continue to enable it to happen. Indeed recent statistics testify that it’s on the rise – the number of romance scams jumped by 30 per cent last year, according to Lloyds Banking Group.
Romance fraud is when a person is tricked into believing they are in a romantic relationship with someone they met online, when in fact they are in a relationship with a criminal using a fake identity. The aim is to build up enough trust to persuade them to send over money.
The term ‘fraudster’ is universal when discussing fraud, but this often infantilises and downplays the sheer criminality of what actually happens. Coercing – usually aggressively – hundreds of thousands of pounds out of an individual is no small feat. It involves months of building a unique narrative through grooming, identity theft, photoshopping, various fake accounts and emotional manipulation. Fraudsters are criminals, and ruin lives in ways that can be just as devastating as violence.
One especially notable characteristic of fraud is the experience of victim blaming, which can be felt from everyone including the banks, the police, or family and friends. It is particularly confusing how so much judgement is placed on victims for their role in what they perceive to be a genuine, meaningful relationship, whereas the borderline sociopathic tendencies of the criminals themselves are often dismissed in the name of the victim’s apparent stupidity.
Fraud is famously very poorly prosecuted. So when it comes to romance fraud, the victim indisputably gets a harsher punishment than the sociopath who they thought could be their future life partner. Romance fraud victims have had mental breakdowns, had to sell their house, feel alienated from friends and family, or all three.
By some contrast, the perpetrator walks away £100,000 richer and does it to someone else. Even if you think that maybe the victim ‘should have known better’, one could concede the outcome feels remarkably disproportionate.
The consequences of this victim blaming culture are also more far reaching than just the specific victim. For a start, it means people are much less likely to report it, which enables the criminals further.
And if upon reporting, police perceive a fraud to be at least partially the victim’s fault – which they have been known to do by many accounts – their incentive for investigation is weakened dramatically. As the incentives for the police to investigate reduce, the incentives for criminals to keep committing the same fraud only increase.
It’s not just about reacting to the fraud either. What is often understated is that preventing romance fraud in the first instance is not entirely impossible. Dating apps are not compelled to have an official identity verification process or ‘know your customer’ checks. Some of them have them anyway, but not all of them. And reverse image searching – the process of putting the image into Google image search to see if it has been used anywhere else – could be proactively applied, but the onus is currently on users to do this.
The fraudster business model involves the active exploitation of weaknesses or gaps wherever they might exist, be it human or technical. When one weakness disappears, they find another one. And humans are consistently considered the weakest of weaknesses in this fraud chain. This can and should change.
Making a proactive effort to cut fraud off at the source – by shifting the focus from victims to the criminals themselves – would not only be more effective, but fairer.