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Understanding Romance Scammers Through the Lens of Their Victims: Qualitative Modeling of Risk and Protective Factors in the Online Context

Fangzhou Wang ; Volkan Topalli (2022) — American Journal of Criminal Justice

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DOI: 10.1007/s12103-022-09706-4 (opens in a new tab)

Type:   Journal Article
Country:   United States
Tags:   AI-Enabled Fraud, Fraud Scenarios, Impression Management, Interpersonal Deception, Offender Tactics, Prevention, Risk Signals, Romance Scams, Social Engineering, Victim Experience, Victim Testimonials
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Qualitative research
Examines experiences, meanings, or processes, often through interviews or observations. It can explain how something happens without estimating how common it is.
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Synopsis

            
The study conducted theory-driven thematic analysis of 52 publicly posted, vetted romance-scam victim testimonials (32 female; 20 male) from five websites. Authors reviewed 2,134 reports, applied narrative/detail-based inclusion criteria, and coded selected accounts in NVivo. Offenders reportedly invested heavily in early grooming through similarity, shared personal details, love letters, poems, and gifts before initiating financial manipulation. The discussion identifies trust investment, empathy, social isolation, recent relationship disruption, and romantic idealization as factors associated with susceptibility. The study relies on self-produced victim testimonials rather than direct offender data.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
Prior research emphasizes fraudster typologies, financial impacts, and scheme mechanics, with less attention to reciprocal offender–victim communication, impression management, deception, and the criminogenic online context. The authors note a lack of systematic analysis/model formulation using online victim testimonials and insufficient quantitative or administrative data on online romance-fraud perpetration. Evidence is also limited on tactic evolution after failed versus successful attempts.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
The study conducted theory-driven thematic analysis of 52 publicly posted, vetted romance-scam victim testimonials (32 female; 20 male) from five websites. Authors reviewed 2,134 reports, applied narrative/detail-based inclusion criteria, and coded selected accounts in NVivo. The primary author coded themes and quotations; the second author replicated the process, with themes finalized through discussion and checked for distinction using NVivo matrices. Analysis identified social-engineering techniques, fraud scenarios, changing victim attitudes, and aftermaths.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
The study relies on self-produced victim testimonials rather than direct offender data. Accounts may be emotionally shaped, selectively emphasize events, and may not be fully accurate. The convenience sample comprises people willing to publicly disclose victimization, mostly in English-speaking countries, limiting demographic and geographic generalizability. Because the sample contains successfully executed frauds from selected websites, it cannot show how tactics differ after failure, change over time, or encompass unobserved fraud methods.

          

        
                  

            
Future Work

            
Interview romance-fraud offenders to compare their accounts of events, motives, and strategies with victims’ accounts. Examine how tactics change following fraud success or failure and over time, including tactics not observed in successful cases. Develop and test platform-embedded predictive algorithms using linguistic and interactional cues, tailored to platform characteristics, as real-time early-warning tools.

          

              

    
    

        
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