Luke O’Neil/Medium, US

How I fell into what might or might not have been a meta-scam.
If it hasn’t happened already, it’s likely that each of us will be the mark of an attempted online scam of one kind or another. You may imagine some shadowy cabal of Nigerian gangsters targeting naïve senior citizens unschooled in internet security or anonymous-style hackers trolling for credit card information, and you probably wouldn’t be too far off.
But what does it mean when the face on the other end of the scam looks a bit more familiar? What if it’s your own?
That’s a question I was confronted with when I was contacted out of the blue by a recently divorced German woman on Facebook claiming to have been involved in a months-long burgeoning romance with a man she had never met. That man was me—sort of. Her broken English only served to heighten the sense of disconnect from reality as she explained the details of her affair:
“normally it is not my way to contact an absolut strange man at facebook, but it might be, that this i want you to tell is a little bit interresting for you. first sorry, because of my bad english, but i am a german and not otfen using english words. so, now the little story i want you to tell. you are not really a stranger for me, okay only your fotos are not strange, because a few month ago i got a friendship request from a man at facebook. i was a little bit curious to know more about this man, he sent me some fotos, fotos from you. now, four month later i found out the real identity of the man showing at this fotos are you and i found out that the man, who uses your fotos is an nigerian scammer.”
My initial reaction to reading this was one of bemusement. Naturally someone would use a photo of me in a situation like this, I thought. Aren’t I the handsome fellow?
But after going back and forth with the woman over Facebook, it occurred to me that maybe I was actually the mark of a meta-scam wherein the real scammer is falsely claiming to have been scammed by someone claiming to look like me in order to get the type of sympathy that these sorts of romance scams rely on. Although none of the internet security experts I asked had ever heard of that approach in particular, there was a perverted sort of logic to it. The role of the scammer in these ploys is to engender sympathy from the victim in order to convince them to send money. What better way to inspire sympathy than through personal guilt? After all, wasn’t it my fault in a way, for making this woman fall in love? This poor, heartbroken woman had convinced herself she was in love with a man who looked exactly like me.

Did that implicate me in her predicament? It’s vanity, after all, that makes any of us susceptible to these crimes in the first place. What else besides that and loneliness would compel us to believe that someone across the world we’d never met would fall head over heels in love with us over email?
Romance gambits are one of the fastest growing and, sadly, most effective scams on the internet, responsible for well over $50 million in losses in the United States alone in 2011 as reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. And those are just the 5,663 crimes that were reported. The ensuing shame that can result from realizing you were a victim of such a crime or the stubbornly romantic nature of the broken-hearted dupes, ensures that many more instances go unreported. In other countries, like Australia, investigations have found some $10 million a month lost to online dating scammers.
As the ICC explains, the nature of the scam preys on the loneliness of online singles, the majority of whom are over 40 and divorced or widowed, in order to lure them into a complicated scheme that begins with declarations of love but soon shifts to requests for money to overcome financial emergencies.
It’s an offshoot of the classic Nigerian prince gambit, where many of these schemes are believed to originate from. Even the least internet savvy among us are wise to that unrealistic con by this point, but love — that greatest con of them all — seems to be too hard to resist.