Another victim, Kim*, who lives in East Asia, said her scammer refused to do a video call. Watch: How To Tell if You're Being Scammed: Love Scammers' Tactics Exposed (13.20) “This is something scammers are aware of and will nudge victims into doing. “(Victims) may think that if they (discontinue) what they’ve been doing, what they’ve put in would be wasted, so (they) might as well carry on,” Lee said. A scammer can also leverage what is known as the sunk cost fallacy - where victims may be asked to put small amounts of money into a scam, before a progression to more payments. There are cognitive biases that scammers can leverage, like “optimism bias”, where people tend to think bad things are unlikely to happen to them - like being scammed. “They’ll use this to induce a lot of liking in the grooming stage.” “Or if (victims) value filial piety, (the scammers) will mimic the same thing,” Misir cited. A scammer who knows a victim likes volunteer work, for example, will talk about being a volunteer. One of the persuasion techniques used to groom victims is mirroring. He also gave her the URL for a mining website to link to her crypto wallet, and her initial search on this turned up nothing. T he apps and crypto exchanges he had recommended were in the App Store and Google Play Store, and she googled them to confirm their legitimacy. When he finally did, “I thought I was smarter this time round and did my checks,” she said. While she was contemplating leaving her job, he came across as "very supportive”, she recalled, and they continued to chatįor over two months, he did not bring up investing. She also became wary of strangers approaching her on Instagram.Īnd yet - her vulnerabilities were what another acquaintance on social media used to scam her again. “It’s very stupid.”Īs for Kelly, after losing S$15,000, the financial consultant lost self-confidence in her professional skills. “What can I do? Because of this, I end my life?” she questioned. She ignored him and deleted her social media accounts. During their relationship, he had requested intimate photos and videos of her - and a day after she cut off contact with him, someone messaged her on WeChat threatening to forward the photos and videos to her friends. “If I have money to (buy food), then I should pay all the money back.”įor Kayla, the blowback also continued after she lost S$50,000 to 'Linus'. “I had to start … again (from scratch),” said Han Ni, who now works two part-time jobs to pay her friends back and feels “so guilty” when having a meal. He even coached her on how to ask them for money. She had wiped out her savings and had borrowed about S$40,000 from her friends because of Chen Xi’s urgings. That's when she realised, with a shock, that she had already put in S$70,000 - and it was increasingly clear to her that it was a scam. “I felt like I’d put too much money in, so I decided to wait." But she would need to pay another S$10,000. “You could get into the VIP green lane to (jump) the queue,” she recalled being told. Then they said they were processing many clients and her queue number was 986. She remembers one time they said their system was down. “They were very formal and polite, but they kept repeating the same things.” “Every time I contacted the customer service, they made a lot of excuses,” she said. Then she had to put in another S$10,000 for “outstanding tax”. To reactivate it, she was told to put in half the amount she had in there: About S$35,000. Han Ni, who was persuaded to invest in a “game” platform, had her account frozen for “violating a rule”. Other victims cited similar experiences of the never-ending top-ups required of them. But they have something in common: The strangers who befriended them were all after their money.Įliza, Samantha and Sajid are victims of pig-butchering scams, an emerging hybrid of romance and investment scams in which victims are groomed for weeks or months before they lose a fortune in bogus investment schemes or illegal gambling sites.Īccording to statistics from the non-profit Global Anti-Scam Organisation (Gaso), which focuses on pig-butchering scams, nearly 2,000 people have lost over US$310 million (S$440 million) in total since its formation in mid-2021. The trio are separated geographically and motivated by different things. When she suggested her platform, he thought, “Why not?” He had a cryptocurrency portfolio worth a six-figure sum and was looking to move it somewhere other than ledger wallets so that it could be more easily available at short notice. When the woman, named Nydia Chen, told him she was a cryptocurrency analyst, it seemed to him that her profile was suggested because they had similar interests. He added her as a friend out of curiosity and asked her how they knew each other. Over in Edmonton, Canada, Sajid Ikram was facebooking when a person he had never met appeared on his “people you may know” list.
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