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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

0:00:10
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Pascual Romero and with me is/are…

Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward.

BR: And Ben Radford.

0:00:38
CW: I’m excited about this episode. We are going to be discussing romance scams. There actually are some folklore angles to this. I’ve never really thought of scams as folklore, but they do have a history and they do repeat and there are some angles here that we’re going to be looking at from a skeptical perspective. For anybody who didn’t catch it, Wendy Hughes wrote a wonderful article about her experience with a romance scam in the Skeptical Inquirer, which came out in October of last year, like right before PsyCon. So if you haven’t read it, you can pause the episode, hurry and read that. You can find it online and then we’ll get back with you after you’re done.

BR: And while you’re checking out Wendy Hughes article online, is there anything anyone’s skeptical of this week?

0:01:41
CW: Yes, I’m skeptical of something actually I should say Graham Hancock should be skeptical of something we discussed Graham a while back. He’s the pseudo archaeologist behind ancient apocalypse.

0:02:05
BR: Yeah.

0:02:06
CW: There’s been some news that Graham Hancock is probably very confused about.

0:02:14
BR: To be fair, Graham Hancock is confused about a great many things. You’ll need to narrow that down.

0:02:20
CW: Often while he’s standing in a field, he looks very confused. Apparently, an amateur layperson, archaeologist, or a paleoanthropologist really, a sleuth, has deciphered messages hidden in Stone Age cave art for 25,000 years, according to the headline on Business Insider. So that means a wondrous thing has occurred. The closed-minded academic fortress of big archaeology has listened to a layperson who has no formal training or letters after his name. Not only did they not try to silence him or laugh him out of the university, they welcomed his contributions to the field. Oh my god! A gentleman named Ben Bacon, who is a furniture restorer by day, he has a big interest in the Stone Age, and he may have decoded what’s supposed to be the first writing ever set down by Homo sapiens. You may have read the story by now, but Bacon proposed that the dots on some of these cave paintings of animals corresponded to those animals’ breeding seasons, and there was a symbol that kind of looks like a Y. He theorized that that indicates birth. And these drawings and markings go back like 20,000 years, and sources that I found say that they were a mystery since being discovered around 150 years ago. So indeed, I saw a lot of familiar phrases like perplexed anthropologists and, you know, baffled this and, you know, confused that. And not only did he not get laughed at, but they made him the first author on a paper that was accepted into the Cambridge Archaeology Journal, which published January 5th, so just last week. So Graham Hancock, if you’re listening, you should be taking notes on this on how to do citizen science. So while not every single paleoanthropologist accepts every word of Mr. Bacon’s theories here, there’s a lot of news stories embracing the new information and celebrating the maverick researcher who, well, it turns out not to really be a maverick. He’s a cooperative fellow. He befriended a lot of archaeologists and he learned from them. And this is a fantastic little story for amateur science. Yay.

0:04:42
BR: Very cool. Well, I have a couple of quick things that I’m skeptical of, or at least thinking about. One of them is George Santos, the former astronaut who left his position as Surgeon General to become the New Jersey representative for the Republicans. He’s in hot water. You may have you may have heard about him. We don’t have the time to list all. We’d be here for hours listing all his falsehoods. I’ll just put on a few.

0:05:14
CW: He is like the walking embodiment of like false accreditation and, you know, phony school papers and everything.

0:05:22
BR: Yeah, it was just and it just by the day there’s new revelations. Apparently he, you know, he claimed that he’d graduated from universities and he even gave his GPA and said he was in the top 1% of his class. He didn’t, in fact, even go to, he didn’t graduate from any university or college at all. Apparently he said he was, I think, a volleyball star.

0:05:48
CW: He does not look like a volleyball star.

0:05:50
BR: His family survived the Holocaust. He got COVID.

0:05:55
He may have lied about getting COVID. Just like, right, I mean, things that’s not even worth lying about. Like, you know, oh, I stubbed my toe. Did you, George? Did you really?

0:06:05
CW: Has somebody checked to make sure he’s not three raccoons in a trench coat?

0:06:10
BR: I don’t know. That would be, we should do an investigation at some point. But as somebody who studies liars and hoaxers, I’ve just been just astonished and sort of, I don’t want to say schadenfreude-laden, but it just, I would just every morning I’m reading the Times like okay, what fresh silliness is this going to be?

0:06:31
CW: You’re going to have to quit all your jobs Ben and just focus the rest of your career on studying Santos.

0:06:36
BR: I think I am. And anyway, again I’m sure many of our listeners know it so I won’t go into the whole thing but he apparently fabulated and just basically made up a whole lot of his biography. There was not much they could do about it. So he was actually seated and sworn in.

0:06:53
CW: That’s the real kicker, isn’t it?

0:06:54
BR: Well, yeah, it’s one of the things where, so there’s, there’s sort of good and bad here. So you might think the Republicans would have said, you know, we don’t need this. This is not what we need right now. But they, again, they said that they were pretty much forced to swear him in. Although, as I’m sure you guys have noticed, he’s been somewhat ostracized. So, in fairness, in fact, as we’re recording this, there have been renewed calls by some of his GOP colleagues and others to kick him out just because he’s just becoming too much of an embarrassment and the memes are just, the memes are just, oh man, yeah, he was abducted by the Klingons and it just, I mean, I think it was wrote himself into one of the Tolkien novels. I don’t know. It was just I don’t even know what’s going on.

0:07:42
CW: It just keeps getting bigger and bigger. One thing that is actually a real thing. Some lawmaker, I don’t know who, some Democrat proposed a bill to stop this sort of thing from happening again, saying stop another non-truthful office seeker. It’s the Santos Act.

BR: Oh, acronyms to the rescue.

CW: Yeah, Congress can get pretty snarky with their acronyms when they really put their mind to it.

0:08:11
BR: Well, we will see. Again, the story’s been unfolding for a couple of weeks. Full credit to The New York Times, which was the first to really break the story. I remember reading it, I think, about two weeks ago. And, you know, they did an in-depth investigation and at first the response was, well, this is just a smear attack by the lying New York Times. You know, this is all just an attempt to tarnish me. Well, all of it was true. So this was, it wasn’t because he’s gay, wasn’t because he’s Puerto Rican, wasn’t because his family’s from Brazil. It’s because he’s a liar. That’s, let’s be very clear about that.

0:08:43
CW: Well, he also claimed a family member has died in the Holocaust, which is, I know one of the lies and hoaxes that you’ve seen come up a number of times with other people.

0:08:53
BR: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just and I just just down the line and again, just sort of to see so many parts of this in one individual and have it unravel in public is just it’s just remarkable. I mean, yeah, you know, occasionally you’ll see stories about somebody who embellished the resume, this and that and the other. But just the it wasn’t just one or two things. I mean, it’s just like, you know, you start to wonder if he says he drove to work that day. Did he?

0:09:18
Did he really have pasta last night?

0:09:20
CW: Well, we’ll see what happens hopefully this will be a warning for all future politicians that you know, the press will be looking a little bit closer. Maybe maybe look into these things before the person is elected next time.

0:09:40
BR: Exactly. So there you go. I’ll just throw out two quick other things. I was recently on an episode of a show called Your Weirdest Fears, talking about spontaneous human combustion.

0:09:52
CW: Oh, that’s a classic.

0:09:54
BR: SHC. So if you if anyone’s interested in, I think it’s both a podcast and a video or transcript. So if people want to check that out, it’s Your Weirdest Fears. And I’ll also just mention that our friend of the show, Leo Igwe, fearless and tireless advocate for human rights and other things in Nigeria, is in the process of starting a fundraiser for his group, Advocacy for Alleged Witches, which I’m a proud member of and have worked on behalf of. And-

0:10:24
CW: We can vouch for Leo. He’s not just a random person asking for money. He’s a real person. We know him personally. We’ve hung out with him.

0:10:31
BR: I will absolutely vouch for Leo. And in fact, we may even be trying to pull together a bit of a fundraiser for his very worthy organization in the coming weeks. So watch for that.

0:10:42
CW: And one last thing on your calendar. I don’t know if you all have noticed at home, but we’ve got a confluence of superstitious events happening. Friday the 13th is tomorrow and and it also happens to fall during a time when Mercury is in retrograde. I’m not sure what happens now. Do they cancel each other out or does the world just explode?

PR: I’m not sure but Mercury in retrograde is kind of like the astronomical equivalent of when you’re stopped at a stoplight and the person next to you starts moving forward and for a split second you think you’re rolling backwards.

0:11:22
I don’t know if that helps anyone wrap their heads around it, but that’s what it is.

0:11:28
CW: It is a catch-all and as our lives become more entangled in technology and for some reason Mercury in Retrograde got associated with technological snafus. People are getting more and more superstitious around me when it comes to Mercury in Retrograde. The printer’s not working, darn planets, you know. So, yeah, try to hang tight, everybody. We’ll get through this together.

0:11:57
Everybody survive the next week, and we’ll be back.

BR: Or if you’re really worried about it, if you want to make any bequests to Squaring the Strange, and you will, this could be your last Friday the 13th in retrograde. We’re happy to take it.

CW: Yeah, sign up for our Patreon before the world ends.

PR: And with that, let’s get into Romance Scams.

CW: Well, for our main topic this week, we’re looking at something you can generally call romance scams. You know, there’s many different types of fraud and hoaxes, and it’s sort of a lateral move away from skepticism and into sort of crime fighting. But I think there’s a lot to be plumbed here in the depths of what a romance scam is. One thing for romance scams, they certainly generate money. In the past five years, according to the FTC, over one point three billion dollars has been reported lost to romance scams. That’s just what’s reported here in America. There’s likely a bottom to that iceberg that you don’t know how big it is. Because victims, much like victims of psychic scams, they often keep their losses a secret, or they might even rationalize years of their losses and never realize that they’re a victim. The money just will stop after they pass away or go broke. In 2021 alone, there was over $500 million lost to these scams, which represents a six-fold increase from five years prior. So they’re on the rise, and there’s a number of factors for why they’re on the rise. The pandemic, of course, made for a lot of scam opportunities, whether it was miracle cures or selling buckets of survival slop, or anything else, really. There was a lot of weird stuff popped up in the pandemic. But it also made for a huge increase in the loneliness that people feel. And lonely people fall for these scams. And everybody turns to the Internet, not just for their groceries and for their medical information, you know, but for companionship. And, you know, there’s no stereotype that’s the one and only prey that these scammers go after. People have this thought in their mind of an older woman with seven cats who’s just being bilked out of her life savings, you know, the same kind of person you imagine also sends their money to the 700 Club every day. In reality people from every walk of life at every stage of their life have been taken in by what’s been termed cat fishing.

0:14:42
PR: So social engineering is kind of a broad category. That’s what cat fishing falls under, that’s what romance scams fall under. Basically any kind of confidence game. We call it social engineering nowadays. This is something that I have some familiarity with because of some of my experience in the cybersecurity world because social engineering is a big part of that. Like what we call phishing, which is where you attempt to get people to divulge information through email or divulge passwords and things like that. And even just things like just a confidence game where you do get someone to trust you enough to give you money. In a lot of cases, it could be like the Bernie Madoffs of the world or you’re

0:15:26
or a street confidence artist who has some sob story to try to get some money out of you.

CW: Yeah. And there’s so many different ways that scammers can get you. It’s almost infinite. I worked at a cybersecurity conference and one of the people I drew handed me a little quote unquote tip like, hey, here have this, it’s a neat little tchotchke. And it was a little USB drive that had a little rubber ducky on it. And I’m like, oh cute, so I’ll add this to my collection. I can use it for, and the person I was working for, a cybersecurity expert said, do not put that anywhere near a computer you love. And then it got passed around the booth and laughed at because apparently that type of scamming is called the rubber duck scam. It’s called rubber ducking. And this guy, and they’re like, who handed this to you? I’m like, some guy who said he was from China. And they’re like, Oh, stay far away from that.

PR: Yeah, and there is a big conference in Las Vegas called Black Hat.

CW: That’s what I was working.

PR: Yeah, so I’ve I’ve been there and it’s yes, you know, you don’t even want to take your own personal cell phone into that building. Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard. Yeah, so but you know, it’s in all fairness most people aren’t going to try to do anything too sketchy to you there. But that is social engineering central. And again, the way he handed you a little tchotchke, and it was something you’re like, oh, that’s really neat. I’d like to use this. Well, that’s also social engineering because it’s using your enthusiasm towards receiving something as a way to break the barrier of your security. So you plug it into your computer, and sure enough, they’ll have control over it.

0:17:14
CW: And I’m used to getting free stuff at cons. It’s one of the fun things about working in them.

0:17:18
PR: Exactly.

0:17:18
CW: You get Yo-yos and chocolates and lightsabers and all sorts of cool stuff.

0:17:23
PR: Yep.

0:17:24
CW: Don’t plug it in your computer.

PR: Exactly. Um, but yeah, so that kind of brings us back to catfishing because, uh, catfishing is a form of social engineering, um, that exploits the natural tendency of people to trust others. Even though we like to think we don’t trust anyone these days, it’s just kind of human nature as a social animal to trust people. And that’s what catfishing takes advantage of because you want to believe them and it’s just human nature to do that.

0:17:53
CW: Yeah, I did a little digging on the term catfishing and it’s got a little bit of an interesting provenance. Slate traces it back and notes that the 2010 documentary Catfish, it has a fellow named Vince Pierce, who’s the husband of a woman who was catfishing someone. He has a quote on that documentary where he says that catfish used to be put in vats with the fresh cod to keep the fish agile and moving during the long trip from Alaska to China. Well, the problem is fishermen say that, no, this was never done with cod. And it makes no sense. I mean, the two fish aren’t even they aren’t even enemies. They don’t even know each other well enough to be enemies because cod are saltwater fish and catfish are freshwater bottom feeders, so it’s it’s a made up metaphor, but not out of whole cloth, because going further into the Slate article, Henry W. Nevinson had a 1913 book called Essays in Rebellion. And in one of those essays called The Catfish, it tells that same tale, that catfish were put in big vats of water with codfish to keep them lively. And Nevinson, in that essay, compares the catfish anecdote to other allegorical Christian stories, like including Faust and the parable of the leaven. Now for Nevinson, he actually kind of meant that Christianity itself was the catfish. It was the thing that kind of kept humanity on its toes. Without which, quote, “the soul of Europe would have degenerated into a flabbiness, lethargy and desperate peace”. So the human race is the cod and Christianity is the catfish. And I didn’t expect to find religious overtones to the whole con game here, but it’s kind of poetic.

0:19:48
BR: Well, that reminds me of the flirty fishing themes that the Children of God cult used. Do you do you know about those?

CW: I don’t know either of those things.

BR: Well, so the Children of God, I use the word cult. You know, one has to be careful about calling religions cults. Scientology has been known to sue people. I’ll just call it a cult. They can come after us if they want. They’ve since changed their names, but there’s a couple of documentaries and some books on this group called the Children of God. And there was a program that was institutionalized, it was actually codified in their teachings, that was part of their doctrine from about 1974 to the late 1980s, in which female members of their group were encouraged to sleep with non-members to sort of bring them into the fold, as it were.

0:20:41
CW: Oh, wow. Literally taking one for the team there.

0:20:44
BR: Yeah, it was seen as sort of a combination of proselytizing and a way to get donations and a way to interest single men and women in some cases to come into their church. It’s this interesting sort of theme of like, you know, going to where the sinners are. You know, it was widely, this wasn’t a secret, I mean, that was widely discussed. And in fact the women that were encouraged to do this were called affectionately God’s whores.

0:21:18
CW: Okay.

0:21:20
BR: Yeah, and I was reading something that said as many as 200,000 men and again some women were probably brought into the the children of God group and there were probably Thousands of children who were born as a result of that. There are a couple of others. I mean, there we could do a whole show on sex cults and we probably should.

CW: Well, can we, can we?

0:21:43
BR: Yes, we can. But I will mention one other one other group which has been successful in in sort of using titillation to bring members in. I’m sure you guys have heard of Go Topless Day.

CW: Like at the office or something.

0:21:56
BR: Yeah, yeah. No, no, not no.

CW: I’ve heard of naked gardening day and ride the subway with no pants on day.

0:22:10
BR: Well, those are those are subcategories, I suppose.

PR: Isn’t that the I want to say I recall like there being a lot of municipalities that don’t have specific laws against it and people exercising the right to to shirtless equality, I guess you’d say.

0:22:28
BR: Yeah. In fact, there are actually many places across the country and I think including New York City, if I’m not mistaken, where it is legal for women to go topless. But there’s there’s a website called Gotopless.org. It has it’s run by this organization that, again, has promoted Go Topless Day for many years. That organization are the Rayaleans, the UFO cult.

0:22:50
CW: Oh, the weirdos who’ve got like billboards along the highway from here to LA. Yeah, okay.

0:22:55
BR: So they’re like, huh, how do we get people interested in our, well, you know, it’s this sort of perfect blend of sort of titillation and liberation and hey, come to our Go Topless Day events. And by the way, here’s a brochure on our UFO beliefs.

0:23:15
CW: Come for the boobs and stay for the cult.

0:23:17
BR: Something like that, yes.

0:23:19
CW: Well, to move away from all the peripheral cults that use it as a way to fish people in, the standard social media grabs for your attention and perhaps your affection and your money later on, there are obvious ones that I’m sure everybody has seen. Facebook always wants to introduce me to 50-something handsome retired army officers or doctors. And every other woman in her 40s I know gets the same friend requests, probably with the same photographs. And they all have names like Jim Steven or William Evan. It’s always like two first names, very common white bread first names stuck together. But this is almost like a smokescreen, because just because you can pick out the ones that look obvious to you, you can’t let that give you a false sense of security that you have this ability to discern all scams. You don’t. Somebody might hand you a rubber duck, you know, USB port, and it won’t be something that you’ve heard of. Now, there’s that old skeptical guideline, don’t ever let yourself believe that you can’t be fooled. So while we have the online aspect here, which is new, because, you know, we haven’t been online as a human species for longer than 20 or some odd years, scams have been happening way before computers. Pretty much since there were people and there were money, there have been scams. A fellow named Alistair Gillespie of Lancaster University states that the first romance scam on record, he says that that’s the Spanish prisoner scam, which he said dates back to the 16th century. Many other sources I found claim it only really dates back to the early 19th century. And it was chronicled by Eugene Francois Vidoque, who was a Frenchman who started out as a criminal and ended up becoming the father of criminology. His writings actually inspired quite a few writers. Edgar Allan Poe was among them. But have you guys heard of the Spanish prisoner swindle? Do you know what that is?

0:25:24
BR: Vaguely, yes. The name sounds familiar. I think I know the basic outlines, but there’s so many of them. So why don’t you enlighten us?

CW: Well, I’ll go ahead and quote Professor Gillespie here from his 2017 article on the topic in the Journal of Criminal Law. “A typical 16th century case would involve a wealthy benefactor being engaged in discussion by the trickster. The benefactor would be told that the trickster, who will invariably be posing as a member of society, is in correspondence with a wealthy and important member of the Spanish nobility who was being held captive. Money is required to help secure his release, generally to bribe the guards, pay for passage, etc. And the trickster allows the benefactor to share some of these costs in return for a percentage of the significant reward that has been promised. As an added bonus, the Spanish prisoner has a beautiful daughter who is as yet unwed, with the noble Spanish prisoner, no doubt looking favorably on any match involving their savior.” So you see the romance angle in there was obviously the daughter is in there as sort of a extra bonus prize in addition to the money. So there’s a little bit of like the Nigerian, you know, please, sir, help me, you know, you know, get my funds out of the bank. scam. So it plays not just into a victim, but two goals that the typical member of high society back then would have, obviously greed for more money and a desire to marry into the nobility. Well, none of us here is hoping to marry into nobility. That’s never really been on my list of things to do. But, you know, as one of the themes we’ve talked about on this podcast is people are the same. The people who had human brains walking around in the 16th or 19th century, are just the same as the people who are walking around now who are your friends and relatives and you. I’ve got a younger relative who was lured into believing that they had an online relationship with somebody who lived overseas. And this person apparently had a sick grandmother and they needed money to help the sick grandmother get medical care. And yes, this young relative got taken for a bit of money. And then the scam turned to blackmail with the other party saying that they had installed spyware on the person’s computer and taped some nude video via laptop that they would then release to everybody on the person’s friend list. And we actually ended up going to the cops with this. This was several years ago. And the cops just kind of shrugged it off and said it was very, very common. And not to worry, there was never any spyware. There was never any video. They don’t have access to send everything to your friends list. Just go home with the knowledge that you’ve just bought some guy in the Philippines a new motorcycle. And try to live with that and don’t fall for it again. You guys all know Emery Emery, right?

PR: Yep.

CW: One of the funniest responses I saw to this very type of scam was when Emery Emery engaged with a scammer who’s trying to do the excat same blackmail thing. Emery wrote back saying, I have been trying to make a pornographic video for ages And I couldn’t get a camera person. This is fantastic. Please release the footage to everybody. I know I You know and then when they didn’t he kept hounding them He kept like messaging them back saying you promised to release the footage. Where is it?

BR: Come on, man!

CW: And yeah, I I can’t be half as clever as Emory Emory is you don’t want to be a scammer trying to mess with him. He has no fear.

0:29:16
BR: Yeah, and listeners may remember an episode or two back, one of the documentaries I touched on that I liked was about Manti Teo, the football player who was catfished himself some years ago. So it’s pretty common. But of course, as you mentioned, I mean, these stories, these stories and these schemes have been going circulating for a long time. I’m reminded back in the 1940s, there was a phantom bride scam. Do you guys know about those?

0:29:47
CW: The Phantom Bride, that sounds like a great like Hardy Boys novel.

0:29:51
PR: Yeah, or a story about a guy who picks up a lady on the side of the road and she leaves her jacket in the car or something.

BR: This is not a Vanishing Hitchhiker story, but it sounds good. There are lots of different scams. There’s one I’m going to focus on, which was that in 1940s, there’s a woman named Susanna Mildred Hill. She was a mother of 10 and she was in her 60s and she lived in Washington, D.C. And she had the bright idea to take out ads in Lonely Hearts magazines and papers like that under different names.

0:30:25
CW: So those are the precursors to like personal ads, right?

0:30:29
BR: Yep, yep.

0:30:30
And she was sort of looking to meet a fine young gentleman and this and that. And she explained that she gave her age as being between 18 to 23 years old, depending on which ad she put out there. She had a fine job and she in fact, was not looking for a man to support her because she was actually supposed to be inheriting a substantial amount of money.

0:30:51
CW: Oh, she’s sounding very Spanish prisoner.

0:30:53
BR: It is indeed, right? But nevertheless, this young, attractive, educated girl was lonely. She was looking to marry Mr. Right. Well, as you might imagine, these ads and notices got many, many responses, and when they contacted her, again, this was the 1940s, so long before we entered anything like that, they would ask to see a photograph. And Mrs. Hill would actually send a photograph of one of her daughters. So she would sort of do this catfishing thing where she would just be juggling dozens and dozens in some cases over the years, hundreds of people. And she was very careful about who she would respond to. So it needed to be somebody who was more than 500 miles away.

0:31:41
CW: Oh, yeah.

0:31:43
BR: And the reason was because, of course, if they lived nearby, they can stop by the house and, you know, knock on the door and ask, is Miss Alice Moody here? Oh, well, all of a sudden, right? And on the rare occasion that people actually would find them, she would answer the door. Again, she was a woman in her 60s. She said, oh, well, you know, I’m her housekeeper, but, you know, she’ll be back later if you want to leave something for her. Anyway, she continued doing this scam for several years.

0:32:09
And basically she would try to lure them in and she would ask them, oh, well, I’m sorry I missed you. My family member is ill. Can you maybe, you know, send me some money? And so illnesses, and it was this sort of typical thing of where there’s always some excuse or some reason where why suddenly they have to they have to get some money. She was finally nabbed by the postal inspectors in 1945 on her way to go cash a check. She was convicted and I believe sentenced to five years in jail. She was known as the Queen of the Lonely Hearts in the 1940s for for pulling off this this particular romance scam.

0:32:51
CW: Well, for one mother of 10, you know, I hate to ever side with a scammer, but she sounds enterprising.

BR: She had a lot of time on her hands, I guess, with being at home anyway.

0:33:01
And so, yeah, so, yeah.

CW: Good on her. OK.

BR: I can’t say she’s not industrious, at least.

0:33:07
CW: Well, I don’t know how personalized and how much research she put into her scams with her various gentleman callers.

0:33:10
But the thing about romance scams is, do you remember a long time ago, we discussed vampires versus zombies? And zombies were like brains, and they just didn’t care who they ate. They just tore through people like they were eating lettuce. It just didn’t matter. And vampires were very selective. They’d go after their their prey and they’d be like, I like this person, a very personalized predator. The thing about romance scams is they’re almost they’re the more vampire of the scammers. It’s they’re very personalized by nature and the hunt can last for years or longer. You know, they find out what you like, what makes you tick. They really personalize it to you. And the operation can be scaled up. So the suitor that’s going after somebody can be completely fraudulent. Often these scammers will use profile pictures that they’ve just grabbed off the internet, off of your Facebook possibly, and they’ll use scripts that have been compiled by many people and gone through trial and error. And they use all this to prop up this fictitious person that they’ve created that the victim will never meet. There was a fellow, a little sidebar here, there was a fellow named Robert Frost, not the poet, but a male model and race car driver who happens to share his name. And this guy, Robert Frost, had his image swiped off the internet and put onto around 90 dating sites. It was to the point where people were recognizing Robert Frost on the street, not as a race car driver or a male model, but that jerk who scammed them or some friend of theirs out of a lot of money. So poor guy. It’s not just limited to fake profiles, of course. As we mentioned before, if you’ve seen even just one Dateline episode, you know that there are real people who scam victims, you know, in the real meat space this way. They will put their own picture up on a dating site, and yes, they will take people on real dates before they get their claws into them and siphon out as much money as they can. So these scammers, they are committed to the bit. Three things to watch out for: If you’re taking notes about any part of this show, write these down at least here. Three things to watch out for are number one, the person will want to move the conversation off of the dating app. This allows them to avoid being flagged as a suspicious entity there. Number two, the person will have a job that works as an excuse for why they are out of the country for long stretches and can’t possibly meet you in person. Good ones for this are a doctor who’s working overseas or somebody in the military, you know, like my gentleman Facebook callers. Or they might say they’re in construction or they’re doing a big job on an oil rig for a long time and they’re stuck out there. I’m trying to think of, you know, honestly, if I if somebody struck up a conversation with me and said that they were a scientist working on working on Antarctica, that might work for me.

0:36:27
BR: Or an astronaut, you know?

0:36:29
CW: Or an astronaut at the ISS, you know, you’ve got to tailor it for your particular person’s nerdy needs here.

0:36:35
BR: Absolutely.

0:36:36
CW: So once they’ve got their claws into somebody, they will love bomb them at the beginning. There will be over-the-top flattery and romantic exchanges and gifts. And I believe that’s also what narcissists do. So I mean, that’s two reasons to be wary of somebody who’s love bombing you. They might be a scammer or they might be a narcissist. And those two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. So watch out for those three things. The love bombing, the job overseas, and the wanting to move the conversation off the dating app. Now, I do wonder what part AI is going to start playing into all of this, which I’m sure AI is already involved somehow when it comes to putting together a script or something for a potential fake suitor to say in English when the person’s, the scammers native language is not English. There’s definitely some AI that makes conversation a little bit more readable. I mean well all know that when we see emails pop up that are poorly written with grammatical mistakes, with spelling mistakes, that’s a huge automatically obvious sign that it is fraudulent, that it is a scam, that it is just phishing, that it is just, you know, worthless, just delete it. As AI gets better at cleaning up that mess, it might be a little bit harder to parse those out. Although it’s tempting to just just blame the technology here. Technology is also working on the side of the good guys. Like I said, dating sites are constantly sweeping their sites for fraudulent behavior. And nowadays, with zoom and all kinds of platforms, it’s no longer an excuse to say I can’t possibly get in touch with you, I can’t possibly meet face to face. It’s not the 1940s where living 500 miles away is a barrier to ever seeing the other person. It becomes a lot more suspicious when the person you’re sort of dating can never really seem to make time to get on a Skype call with you. Do people even use Skype anymore? Is it all Zoom or Microsoft Teams now?

0:38:43
PR: Yeah, I guess so. That’s pretty much where my life is now.

0:38:47
CW: Yeah. So, you really could date somebody from Antarctica and it would be, you know, you know, it could work. You could talk to each other. So there you go.

0:38:56
BR: Well, you know, I’m reminded of, do you guys remember the fallout of the Ashley Madison leak about 10 years ago?

0:39:04
CW: Oh yeah.

0:39:05
PR: Yeah.

0:39:06
BR: Yeah. I mean, it’s sort of peripherally related, but basically they found out that like 99% of the female profiles on Ashley Madison, this sort of, you know, cheating website were fake.

0:39:17
Yeah. It’s like, you have all these men, you know, like, oh, I’m going to find this, this, you know, hot married young wife who wants to sleep with me. And I mean, there were a handful. I mean, there may be a couple thousand or something like that, but like the vast majority of the female accounts were completely fake and they were just, you know, just suckering them in.

0:39:40
CW: Paying for a chat bot. To go a little further along on the script here, when the scammers get to the crisis, when they get to the thing where they elicit money from their, their mark, because they find themselves in some dire circumstance, they also play on something we’ve discussed on the show many times, which is rumors and fears of what lies out there, what it is like in other countries. You know, they play on fears about stereotypes that Americans have about foreign lands. Like, I didn’t find a scam where they say that their kidney is going to be stolen if they don’t come up with some money. But that wouldn’t shock me. These scams often turn on “help I’ve been arrested by a corrupt police officer, you know, in this third world country. I need money to get out of jail because the whole system’s corrupt here.” Or “I have been in a car accident and I’m injured and I need money for the doctors to save my life because the doctors are all corrupt here.” They won’t save anybody’s life unless they get paid first. I’m sure the list of things would not surprise you, Ben, as a folklorist of stuff that is being said just because Americans will believe it.

0:40:54
BR: More and more every day, like they say, you know, the truth never stands in the way of a good story.

0:40:59
CW: Yeah. And the more I looked into these, really, there’s a lot of parallels, I thought anyway, between romance scams and psychic scams. And the fraud is way underreported because victims fear that they’re going to be seen as gullible or worse. And it’s caused a lot of family turmoil for many of the victims after the fact. Sometimes family members view their their parents’ money or something as theirs, like children will get upset that, oh, mom spent our inheritance on a scammer or grandma lost the family fortune or something. And it’s a wrongheaded way to think because nobody’s owed an inheritance, but it still happens. And so victims don’t want to cause this family turmoil. They don’t want to be seen as irresponsible. They keep it to themselves. And another part of this that’s not really reported is, in addition to realizing that their money is lost, victims are also in – they have to process the disappearance of what was a real person to them. Sometimes a real person that they’d had a relationship with for years. And there’s no real tradition in society for grieving a person that never existed. You don’t really hold a funeral. You don’t break up with them. It’s just poof. You find out, you know, that’s the closest thing I can think of, like the Mandela effect in real application there. Just suddenly you’re in a world where the person that you thought existed never did. And like I said, don’t ever think that you’re not in danger of this because you’re not in that category. One of the things I found out was that the LGBTQ community was actually over-targeted. Professor Gillespie said that it happens in that community more often than you would think, and that kind of is not surprising when you consider that the queer community was a really an early adopter of all the dating technologies out there. They use them far more than their straight counterparts and online dating also allows people who have maybe haven’t come out of the closet yet to experience romance in a more private way, which again is kind of bait for scammers. It’s a rife field to try and exploit there. So now that we’ve blown through all that, I’d like to bring on Wendy Hughes and we’ll talk to her a little bit about her experience and how she processed it and really kind of made it a force for good that I think is a great example for all skeptics.

And we have a special guest with us, Wendy Hughes. People may have read her eye-opening article in the Skeptical Inquirer last fall.

0:43:43
It really was an amazing read. She had tremendous courage in writing it and opening up about her experience. Skeptics can get embarrassed if they get trapped by something, if they fall for some kind of flim-flam. But I thought Wendy did a wonderful job of illustrating, you know, why for a skeptic, it shouldn’t be embarrassing. It should be a tool. It should be an example of how easily humans can be fooled. And if you can’t believe that you can be fooled, well, then you really are one of the biggest fools around. So, first off, Wendy, hello. Thank you for joining us.

0:44:27
Wendy Hughes: Thank you for inviting me. I’m glad to be here.

CW: For listeners who maybe have not met you at a skeptical conference or know of your other work, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and when you first started getting into skepticism proper and what organizations and projects you’ve been part of?

WH: Yes, I can. I’m a baby boomer. I’m older than a lot of my friends in the skepticism crowd. But it was fun because I got to learn about modern technology by hanging around with people younger than myself. And I can remember very specifically Jim Underdown saying, oh, you know, people my age don’t really know how to use the internet. And I said, well, I do. And he says, well, you’re very unusual.

0:45:09
BR: Well, he was right. You are unusual.

0:45:14
WH: So I live in Los Angeles, so both Skeptic Society meetings at Caltech and the Center for Inquiry West were both just less than a half hour from home, and I happen to have read the Demon Haunted World when it was published in the in the 1990s and I remembered that Carl Sagan wrote a whole chapter about Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and I received a solicitation to subscribe, and I recognized the name of the magazine. And on the back cover, it had the address of the Los Angeles Center for Inquiry West. And they happened to be having, just by coincidence, they had as a guest speaker, later I found out was Susan’s boyfriend, Mark Edward, and he was doing a seance. And I was kind of surprised, but it was a seance for skeptics. So later Brian Hart, a founding member of IIG, which is now called CFIIG. It was Independent Investigations Group, which is the grassroots skeptic group. And then it was kind of reorganized to be CFIIG. So Brian came over to talk to me, and he invited me to come to an IIG meeting. And to tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure that they weren’t ghost hunters.

0:46:50
This was around 2003 or 2004.

BR: A sketchy lot.

WH: Yeah, like I’m very, but interesting people. I think there were only two women at the time and just like these sort of geeky guys. It was fun though. I think it was just before Facebook started maybe, but internet was bulletin boards at the time. And so they taught me how to use what was that very early version of the internet. And I had already taken a course at LA Valley College, a critical thinking course. This was giving me an opportunity to really use what I had learned and to apply the skills that I had learned to defeat bullshit in everyday life. And so I was in the IIG and I could see that it was the steering committee members that did all the investigations and I wanted to be them. But I was already bringing projects that I thought that IIG should be interested in. For example, there was an article in a local magazine or it was an advertisement really about this company that was giving nurses training in therapeutic touch. The important part was that it was to get continuing education units. And I happen to know what that was because my ex-sister-in-law was a nurse, and she was developing continuing education programs for nurses. And I’m going, that’s what this is. And that investigation lasted for three years, and it was finally written up by Jim Underdown and Owen Hammer. I didn’t get to write that. I wish I had been able to write that story. But that was a really important investigation, I think. And it was crazy because what was happening was that the California Board of Registered Nursing, they were having their own problems and we were just a pesky mosquito on their ass. And they didn’t want to deal with us because they just had bigger fish to fry. And that was very frustrating. But also I participated in investigations of the power balance bracelets and the Altera neutralizer, which was supposed to, I don’t remember what it was supposed to, it was some crazy thing. The thing that I had the most fun with of all was the odds must be crazy, which some people might remember it. It was about coincidences and how people give meaning to coincidences that they don’t really warrant.

0:49:41
CW: I remember that! I called in with, actually, I wrote in with a coincidence to that show, or that segment. It was on Skepticality, right?

0:49:48
WH: That’s right, and it was lots of fun. Susan had a segment on Skepticality, and so did Heather, Heather Henderson, and my, but it was all volunteer. It had a lot of moving parts and a lot of volunteers included. The person that was also an IIG member was Jarrett Kaufman, but there were other volunteers. Barbara Drescher was a real psychologist and statistician, and John Rayl and Heather helped and Ed Clint. And it was so complicated and hard to do that project that when my partner died, I just couldn’t do it anymore. And I keep thinking I want to go back to that and I can’t. So what happened subsequently that my partner died in 2016 and I was really surprised by the disability associated with grief. I mean, it was like I made a lot of mistakes. And I think that the thing with the scammer wouldn’t have ever happened if my life was just the same as it had always been to have a partner. And you can’t I mean like as a as a secularist, I don’t have like that belief that there’s life after death.

BR: Or everything happens for a purpose, you know, or anything like that, right?

WH: Yeah, it’s not part of my reality. But what happened was that that my skeptic friends really stood by me.

0:51:16
CW: Well, before we get too deep into it, we should let listeners know who maybe haven’t read your article, what was the thing that you fell into? What did you end up writing about subsequently as a scam that you, during a very dark part of your life, a very troublesome time, you found yourself a victim of?

WH: What happened was that for a couple of years, I was kind of free floating. I didn’t have purpose and I didn’t, and then I was noticing that maybe I could try dating, maybe meet somebody. And so my daughter and my best girlfriend showed me how to write a profile for dating websites. My daughter says I look really good on paper. My profile looks attractive. And but in, you know, I wasn’t catching any fish. So I also would happen to be on another website as more like a bulletin board for secularists. And it has a component for dating, like you, you post your picture and just a little bit about yourself. And somebody sent me a message and the pictures that he posted of himself, he looked very attractive.

CW: So you got somebody reaching out to you on this dating part of a website where you already assumed or you had every reason to believe that he was part of the skeptic community, the secularists, part of your in-group already.

0:52:45
WH: Right. And so we started a little chat and then he said he was going out of town. He was going to be a executive chef on a cruise ship. And I thought, well, that’s groovy. He can, you know, that that’ll give us time before we meet each other to see if we have anything else in common. And he persuaded me to start to go on to Google Chat. I didn’t know how to do that. And so he had to kind of walk me through it. I have a separate dating email address that’s that’s different from my regular email address. Because someone told me somewhere I forget that that you should never use your real email in these, you know, for dating. And he taught me on email how to get onto Google chat and I found out later that there’s a reason for it that’s associated with the scam and I was believing this was a real, you know real person who really wanted to date me and I was mentioning it to my daughter and she was asking me some questions about it and she told me the truth and she said mom. He’s not your new boyfriend. You’re being catfished. I said, What does that mean? Because I had never heard the expression before. I don’t watch a lot of reality TV. She does. And so she explained it to me. And I didn’t want to believe that.

CW: Now, by that time, had you fallen prey in terms of giving him anything monetary?

WH: Do you know what, I’ve got all the little pieces of paper somewhere, but I think it hadn’t quite gotten that far. Yeah, I think there was like a week or so lag time. I began to pay attention to what was going on and he was asking me. He had this whole story made up about not having access to his papers, including his passport, which I thought was crazy. And that he had sort of like a Dropbox arrangement, but it was a company that I never heard of. And that part doesn’t matter. What he was saying about himself doesn’t matter. There was enough evidence that I had already. He had excuses asking me to take pictures of gift cards, buy gift cards, take pictures of the gift cards and post the pictures on Google chat, which you can’t do on a, on a dating website. So they don’t allow you to post pictures. And so I did that. And all of a sudden, like everything my daughter was saying seemed more real than him.

0:55:31
CW: So once things started falling into place, it sort of gradually hit you. Oh my God, this is what I’m trapped in.

0:55:39
WH: Yeah, only I wouldn’t say trapped compared to other people I’ve heard of since then, and that I was still, you know, heartbroken is a little too severe, disappointed maybe. And the difference for me, here’s what happened. I decided that I would investigate, find out what this was all about. And what in the hell happened to me? How did I get so hung up with somebody that I didn’t even know? And that I was willing to buy gift cards, and take pictures and do what he said to do, thinking that I was in love, or was having a crush on someone’s affection. And I was vulnerable. I understand that, you know, because my partner had died. But there was nothing wrong with me.

0:56:30
BR: You sort of want to figure out, you know, once you realize you’re in that position, you got to figure out how did I get here? Right. Because it’s it’s it’s easy to miss the signs when you’re in the middle of it. And then all of a sudden you’re like, hold on. I don’t know. I sort of see it as like retracing your steps and saying, you know, what steps did I take?

0:56:50
CW: Skeptics are really good at analyzing hindsight rather than just ignoring it.

0:56:55
WH: Well, that’s exactly right, because what happened was that I had the skills. I had been, you know, I call it hobby skeptic. I don’t know what else to call it. I don’t make money as a skeptic. I had the skills as a hobby skeptic to know that there was the internet, the infinite internet out there was going to have something about what happened to me that would be information. And it turned out it was on Reddit, which I barely ever used. And but there was you can look up romance scams, or just scams on Reddit. And sure enough, there was one there was a whole bunch of stories about about romance scams on Reddit. And in fact, there was a, this is something that was not in the article, that there was a person who was a producer for news show, who was placing a message asking if anyone was scammed in a romance scam that would be willing to be interviewed on TV news. And so I wrote back to him or I wrote to him and I said, I bet you’re having trouble getting anyone to say they would do that. And, and he said, Yeah, that’s true. And I said, it’s because it’s embarrassing, because you have to admit that you have been fooled, and that you’re vulnerable. And that’s hard to do.

0:58:26
CW: Yeah.

0:58:27
WH: And so they set up an interview on Zoom or whatever their version of Zoom was. And you know that there’s like 40 or 50 people on Susan’s Thursday evening Zoom trivia game.

0:58:39
CW: Oh, yeah. Susan’s trivia games have become somewhat legendary, yes.

0:58:43
WH: So there was a man who lives in New England who recognized my voice on the news show. He had that news show on and he was in a different room in his house from where his TV was, but my voice is very distinctive and he recognized my voice and he got the link to that news article and he sent it to Susan because he wanted to be sure knew that I had that experience and that I talked about being scammed on a news show. And so she persuaded me to write the article.

CW: So that’s the genesis of the article. Wow.

0:59:22
WH: Yeah, it was it was because of the Zoom trivia game, kind of.

CW: OK, so I was going to I mean, one of my questions was what made you write the article? And it sounds like it was a progression of steps where you realized somebody had to come forward and talk about this for the news reporter. So you filled that role. And then you kind of got fingered by somebody who recognized your voice on skeptical trivia. And then Susan took the ball from there and convinced you to put it in a larger forum.

WH: Right. And she asked Barry. I didn’t think that he would go for it.

0:59:56
But she’s persuasive.

BR: Susan is something. She is a force of nature.

WH: She is! And I sent him a draft because I don’t even remember why I started writing about it. I had no place to post it or write it in order to publish it. But I had the facts that I had collected, which was about the timeline and being forced to do it for Skeptical Inquirer, I got stuck a little bit. There was some of it that was hard to write. Usually that’s very easy for me, but it was emotional. And then, I didn’t realize it was going to happen. It was published the week before, or the week of SCICON. And so there it was, all these skeptics that I know or know of or online or in real life were knowing this very intimate thing about me. And yet, I was also really proud of myself because I was doing the research. What do they say, like, locking up the barn door after the horses got away. It was this experience of already making this hideous, stupid, horrible mistake. And then doing the research. It was just like you said a moment ago, Celestia, doing the research later to figure out what happened. And that’s what I did. And because I figured, okay, a long time ago at TAM, we used to say there was an elevator pitch, which was that, you know, to try to explain to people, because we would be wearing our badges and nobody knows what a skeptic is. And so we had something to say to people if they were in the hotel where we were having our conference about like, what is TAM or whatever the skeptic conference is, and to say what skepticism is, is the intersection of science and consumer protection. And when I first became a skeptic, I was like, I think everybody, just a big foot skeptic that I really wanted, I was interested in aliens and Bigfoot and hauntings and all that fun stuff. And this realization about the role of skepticism and consumer protection is an afterthought, but to me now it’s the most important thing.

1:02:29
CW: Yeah, yeah. As I’ve grown older too, it’s become one of the most important things because, you know, sometimes you lose the sheen of excitement that is there for the Bermuda Triangle or Sasquatch, but darn it, selling homeopathy at CVS, what? This will not stand, you know.

WH: And I mean, like, I guess that the CFI has been paying the legal fees to try to change that.

CW: Yeah, that’s why it came to mind as an immediate example. On that note, in your article, which was very good, like I said, I was so delighted to just read it and it was just so refreshing and honest and laid your whole situation bare for everybody which was compelling to read and you just you’ve got to have empathy for somebody in that situation because you explain exactly how it happened and exactly how it happened and exactly how… One of the if I can sidetrack one of the things I have learned about accessibility is people who are not disabled can’t really think about what they would need in the world if they were disabled. And they think of people who need those things as other people, like they did, it’s an alien sort of thought to them. But people don’t realize that at every point in their life, they will need something like that they might break their arm, They might have their leg in a cast. They might grow older and have a bad back. They might lose their eyesight. And every human being who goes through the normal progression of life will have highs and lows. And as you said, you had just lost your partner. And anybody who lives a full life is going to go through a situation where they lose a partner or they’re in a deep state of grief. So accessibility is kind of parallel to that in terms of like, we can’t advocate for a world that only people who are at the top of their game will survive. We wanna watch out for people who maybe aren’t at the top of their game, because a lot of people like that exist at any given time.

1:04:39
WH: What you made me think of was that soon after my partner died, somebody that I thought I knew was trying to take advantage of my grief and loneliness. It was a living person, somebody that I actually knew, not a scam artist online. And the situation was kind of different. And the thing that I have told myself, or that kind of came a day late, and a dime short, but still is useful information. The bottom line is something that the lady, the lady who cuts my hair, she was asking me questions. And I was telling her the truth about this person and she said don’t trust anyone and that is good advice and maybe there are people who aren’t out to hurt you But it would sure protect you from people who are out to take advantage of your you know of being yeah, you know, not not quite yourself.

CW: Yeah, I hate the idea of never trusting anybody but that old saying trust but verify I like that one.

1:05:41
Now I wanted to go over you listed five thoughts that you summarized in your article that I’d like to repeat for listeners because it’s a nice set Number one set your social media profiles to friends only. Number two if you date online set up a separate email account for that you mentioned that you had done that already that was the thing that you had done that already. That was the thing that you did. Yeah, number three, don’t let anybody persuade you to move a conversation away from the dating website before you have met the person in real life and you’re sure that they are who they say they are. And then the last one here, if friends or family try to warn you that there seems like there’s something wrong about your new online friend, listen to them. Have an open mind about what they have to say. So those are good guidelines to recommend to people who, you know, might be maybe questioning, you know, whether or not they’re dipping their toes into something that isn’t what it seems like it is.

WH: Yes, the friends only is because where those profiles and pictures come from that the scammers are using is from people’s unsecured social media profile. They list photos and they will also, for example, even those so-called psychics go and look, I mean, like they’re not going to lift the pictures, but they’re using your people’s social media for their own ends. The separate email account that I have been, I don’t even remember who told me to do it, but it’s free. It’s Gmail, or you can use whatever email you have. But just if you let somebody you don’t know have your email address, your regular email address, because that is part of the information that not just the scammers, but any kind of, yeah, hackers can use your email address to get a lot of information about you, I understand. I don’t know how it works, but I know better than to, I knew better than to use it for dating.

1:08:02
PR: Yeah. I do kind of work in the cybersecurity world as part of my engineering work. And one thing that making your email visible, the main email that you use, means that people can make attempts on your social media accounts by using that email to reset passwords. So it is really important that you have different emails for different things like that, just because the visibility of your email can, in a lot of cases, allow people fairly easy access to your accounts, just through a bit of social engineering. So that’s definitely an important thing to do.

1:08:40
WH: Right. That’s consistent with what I had heard. So about not letting anyone persuade you to move the conversation away from the dating websites is those dating sites are porous, as it is. They can’t protect you against everything, but they offer some protection, which is better than no protection. At the very least, they don’t allow members to post photographs or phone numbers or links to websites, even though people figure out ways to get around that a little bit. The advantage for the scammer to move your conversation onto a chat on Google or other media is that that’s where they can persuade the victim to buy gift cards, which are used as currency in underground economies.

1:09:29
CW: The other thing about the websites that I read, the dating websites is, since they do have some sort of monitoring in place to look for fraudulent activity. If the scammers start doing all their fraudulent business on the dating website, they’re gonna get booted off. So at the least, if you keep everything on the website, they can’t do anything without risking getting booted off and losing whatever they invested to join that particular site.

1:09:56
WH: Right, exactly. Finally, about friends and family, if they warn you that there’s something wrong. I just got lucky. It was dumb luck that my daughter was listening to me and she loves me and she said, no mom, that’s not your new boyfriend. That’s a catfish. And that somebody’s catfishing you. And she had to explain it to me. But some people don’t have that, don’t have someone telling them. And I’m getting to this, for me it was just a matter of a couple months. For some people, they’re doing that for years. They’re being scammed for years. And their family doesn’t even know that they’re having this weird relationship.

1:10:47
CW: Now people listening at home, just like me and you and Ben, are probably thinking, gosh, this sounds familiar. You know, a scam artist that hits people when they’re down, when they’re grieving for somebody. And thinking about scams in general, you know, scams really do rely on people who are not at the top of their game. Yeah, maybe with the exception of cryptocurrency, they kind of go after people who are enjoying success. It doesn’t matter really, but it is so important to have empathy for people who fall into these types of things and there seems to be a parallel between this type of romance scam and psychics, grief vampires, the people that Susan Gerbic likes to go after. Did you notice that same kind of parallel and even deeper so because you were in the middle of it all?

WH: Later I did, not when it was happening. When it was happening, I was thinking of it as romance, but I think I hear what you’re saying. The so-called psychics are doing something very similar, but they’re just using a different set of tricks.

1:11:54
CW: Yeah, there’s a bit of ventriloquism there in both. And, you know, just as you had like a boiler room full of people typing from scripts, you know, telling the victim what they want to hear in terms of chit chat and small talk that new couples have, you have the psychic pretending to say what somebody from beyond the grave is saying to their loved one, and they’re both kind of operating with a cachet of, okay, this person has experienced a deep somebody that makes them easier prey to sort of glom onto bits of what feels like that same relationship.

WH: Right. And I never would have gone into a psychic shop, you know, like one of those storefronts with a neon hand in the window. I never would have. That was already such a common discussion or well-known, like Mark Edward could do that, you know, those card readings, tarot reading, things like that, and for entertainment. I would have recognized that and I would have known to avoid it, that it was all cold reading and or even hot reading and trickery. I just didn’t see this coming.

BR: And I think part of it is that, you know, these things get dressed up in different ways. So, I mean, it’s easy to think that in the abstract, well, we would recognize a scammer, but if people could recognize scammers all the time, then there would be no more scammers, right?

1:13:28
So, I mean, everybody likes to think that they’re too smart to be fooled. I don’t know. I think it’s sort of the contradiction between the abstract and the personal, right? We can talk all day about logical fallacies, we can give examples, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t fall prey to them now and then, especially if it’s a topic that we’re passionate about.

1:13:48
WH: Yeah, the scammers are doing this for income. That’s their job. They don’t care that the victim is being crushed. Some of the stories that are on that Facebook group, the Scam Haters United, dedicated to helping people get out from the problems they’re having with with online scammers. They talk about people who’ve been giving their money away for years, or have reversed mortgages on their houses so that they can have money to send to their, the scam artists who somehow is persuading them that they need the money more than the person.

1:14:30
CW: There seems to be no upper limit to what some people can end up going through. And sometimes the scam doesn’t end because it gets figured out. It ends because the victim has absolutely no money or they pass away. You know, it sometimes is a till death do us part sort of scenario. I think there’s a lot of parallels and threads that you can kind of tease out. Number one, I was very impressed with, like I said, your bravery and going public with this and discussing it and picking it apart and dissecting it and looking at it from a psychological point of view in terms of yourself as the guinea pig here. I thought one of the threads that was interesting in that vein was how your case kind of illustrated the confirmation bias along with the availability bias, where you said you became aware after the fact of the many warnings out there in terms of books and articles, and you said you even found a printed warning right on gift cards that said, you know, don’t give these to scammers, but you simply hadn’t really noticed any of this before it happened to you. Did that kind of strike you as a common thread for other things we look at in skepticism, how people can kind of completely miss something if it’s not a thing they’re familiar with in the first place?

1:15:44
WH: Well, Celestia, it’s not that I didn’t notice. I was in love. I mean, I may as well have been on drugs.

CW: Oh, oxytocin is a powerful thing.

WH: Yeah. And I mentioned before, I had never seen that show Catfish, or, you know, I didn’t understand that it was a thing. So in that part you’re right. I didn’t recognize it. I didn’t know what it was. That it was even a possibility. I thought that everybody that was on dating websites really wanted a date. It just like turns out that’s not true. And that by the time I actually noticed all of those warnings that are printed, eBay gift cards, and they might be on Steam Wallet cards too, I don’t know for sure. And the signs that were in the drugstore where I was buying the gift cards, and even the little chat that the clerk at the drugstore, the CVS was having with me, because here I am, this cute, you know, little white haired lady buying Steam Wallet cards that were only useful for gaming. And he said, you you’re gonna use five of these. And I said, Oh, it’s from my grandson. I was lying. You know? I was in love, because that was what my, my scammer wanted me to get. And it’s like a form of being in love in a form of insanity, and people who are in love should not make decisions… like getting married!

1:17:19
CW: No, that’s a whole different show

1:17:21
BR: For those who haven’t read the piece, can you sort of talk about some of the excuses? I mean, obviously you you tried to you made efforts to try and FaceTime with them and call and meet and things like that. Can you sort of give us examples of some of the excuses that he came up with to avoid that?

1:17:44
WH: See, I didn’t understand when he was doing it that really he wasn’t himself. He wasn’t who he said he was. He was probably part of a team of people working in a boiler room in sub-Saharan Africa somewhere where somebody had figured out how the internet worked and this whole connection between the pandemic and lockdown and the internet and the strengths and weaknesses of the different websites. And it was like there was supposed to have been, it’s not a real story on Snopes, they said it never really happened. But there was this criminal who was asked, you know, like, why do you steal money from banks? Why do you rob banks? And he was supposed to have said, it’s because that’s where the money is. Well, what these scammers are doing is that they are going to the dating sites because that’s where they can find lonely people who really want to meet strangers and interact with them. And then they have a script that kind of helps them, even if they don’t speak English real well, communicate to their victim, like what they want them to do.

1:19:13
CW: It’s like a reinforcing self-learning system because natural selection, they’re going to pick out what works in the scripts and they’re going to ditch what doesn’t work.

WH: Exactly, and it doesn’t take much. I mean, it’s the cheapest thing in the world. They have gifts or gifs, G-I-F, gifts of blooming flowers and hearts. And I think I mentioned in the article that that Google chat, it makes this pretty sound when you get a message.

1:19:42
CW: Oh yeah, you mentioned it made you feel like part of a Pavlovian experiment where you’d kind of have a reaction to that sound.

1:19:51
WH: And I missed it. Like when I finally made it stop when I finally made the relationship go away. I missed that. That was that was very profound, I thought. And I think that was exactly a part of that particular scammers thing, or, you know, the team that he works with. But I was even able to see that, like, it wasn’t just one person, because they, there would be, like, a different set of grammatical mistakes, different writing style. Like over a period of 48 hours it would change. And so I think that they worked in shifts and that they kept track of how much that each victim, you know, had forked over and what stage they were at, you know, like in the relationship.

CW: It’s almost like farming. You know, they’re keeping track of how much they’ve taken from each person and what works, you know, it’s almost like the way that farmers keep track of watering their fields and crop yield and everything like that.

1:20:55
WH: Oh, it’s a business. It’s totally, it’s a business. And I didn’t just make that up. There was a lot of information online when I finally got around to doing the research. The FBI is interested in trying to make it stop. And FTC, it’s insidious. It is a criminal activity and I was victimized by it.

CW: Well, now since the scam, you know, as you mentioned, you’ve learned a lot and you’ve done some deep dives into how this particular type of fraud is committed. Was it therapeutic to do all this? Was it something you felt like you had to do? Or did you get some sort of satisfaction in learning as much as you could about it?

WH: Yes, it was therapeutic. I feel stronger. I feel really privileged that, first of all, that I kind of knew that it was a good thing to find to try to figure out what in the hell happened to me instead of continuing to feel victimized. And I did have that really strong visceral reaction after Susan’s talk, but you know what? I snapped out of it right away. And I feel privileged that Barry was willing to put that story on Skeptical Inquirer online and that I happened to be in the environment at PsyCon where I was surrounded by other skeptics that were kind to me, including you, Celestia. Because I knew I was doing the right thing in terms of just putting the information out there. I have to tell you, a couple people whose names you’d recognize if I reveal them, but I won’t, are having problems in their families with romance scams.

1:22:48
CW: Oh, yeah. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody who didn’t have a friend or family member who had been touched by something like that.

1:22:55
WH: They talked to me about it and I felt I just hope that they are able to straighten things out in their families. And I’m glad that, you know, that they had that little article about my experience.

1:23:10
CW: Yeah it’s a powerful thing that can be passed on. You’ve provided a link that people can forward to people for years to come if they find that one of their loved ones needs the resource. Now what other resources do you recommend for anybody who wants to sort of up their IQ when it comes to this sort of scam specifically?

WH: I would say to keep it simple, just it’s useful to look up romance scam on whatever their search engine of choice is. There’s information online from the FBI, the FTC, various news organizations. There’s a good one on Wikipedia, AARP, Wired Magazine, and MarketWatch. Also, the backs of eBay gift cards have a phone number. If you have a complaint, it’s like a customer service and they have a whole process. But you have, with eBay, you have to have filed a criminal complaint. I haven’t done it yet, which I’m admitting, I haven’t done it yet. Because I know what it is, is that how are they going to chase down this one person? I don’t know, I should do it. I’ll get around to doing it.

1:24:27
CW: Well, it’s also the diminishing returns and you know, you weren’t taken for as much as some of these other people were. So I know you said you feel lucky about, you know, on that aspect. But what advice would you give to somebody who maybe has already fallen for something like this? Maybe they’re feeling shame about it, or they’re not sure if they have any, you know, any, any positive recourse to take? What would your advice be?

1:24:52
WH: It’s not our fault. It’s not our fault. We were not stupid. We didn’t do anything wrong. The people who have been victimized, the bottom line is we were victimized by a well-organized, very professional in its own way, con, this particular con was taking advantage of something that comes with our evolutionary development that includes the need to be part of a group, part of a family. We survice better that way, and we aren’t doing anything wrong to need love, to try to find partnership and connection with other human beings. And these con artists have figured out how to exploit that, something that we were born with. And we didn’t do anything wrong. The thing to do, though, is just to believe if your family member tells you there’s something wrong with the relationship. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a health professional. All I can say is it hurts a little bit to break it off. And then you feel better.

CW: So there’s a light at the end of the tunnel once you get out.

1:26:15
Absolutely. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Wendy, for sharing your story with us. So if there’s any listeners who want to get in touch with you or follow you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

WH: Facebook still works for me, Wendy Hughes, H-U-G-H-E-S.

CW: All right, well I’ll see you at the next SciCon and thanks very much for joining us.

WH: Thank you very much, Celestia, Ben, Pascual, thank you.

1:26:42
CW: Well, that was really awesome of Wendy to join us. I know I learned some things that I did not know before, having read her article. She kind of added to all of that. And I hope you guys enjoyed the conversation too.

PR: Yeah, it was great. She’s lovely and it’s really great to talk to someone who can be so candid about something like this because not everyone wants to talk about this stuff. So yeah, it was really great having her. And if you’re leaving this episode feeling like there just isn’t enough justice in the world for these scammers, I’d like to mention a very entertaining YouTube channel that I follow that is a guy by the name of Jim Browning and his channel is called Scammer Payback and what he does is he actually allows these cyber scammers and confident scammers into his life a little bit and he does things like reverse hacking them and he breaks into their camera systems. And this guy’s done some pretty remarkable stuff using some very complicated hacking techniques. He’s actually broken up these scam centers around the world and been able to lead law enforcement to them. I mean, he literally hacks into webcams on the laptops and shows footage of the person being scammed back. It’s fabulous.

1:28:56
CW: So what’s that? What’s his channel called again?

PR: It’s called Scammer Payback. And just check it out on YouTube. It’s fantastic.

CW: Okay. Good recommendations. Well, as always, we’re leaving. I feel like I’m being left with a bunch to think about and we’ll think about it for a have it for you next episode. Until then, everybody, take care.

1:28:56
Bye-bye. See ya.

1:29:02
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1:30:25
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