How Victim-Blaming is Helping Scams and Financial Fraud Become An Economic Crisis
Every fraud victim hears at least one victim-blaming statement like “how could you be so stupid?” when they seek help – IF they seek help. They hear it from the people at their bank, law enforcement, and even from their own family.
Worldwide, people and communities underestimate the impact of scams and fraud. In our personal lives, we don’t talk about it with others because “being scammed” is shrouded in secrecy and shame. In public, the way things are often worded in news articles and videos promotes and reinforces beliefs about victims bringing it on themselves.
Research, corporate practices, and government policy all contain subtle indicators that it is the victim’s fault and responsibility.
There is a pattern in all of this that leads many of us to look down on scam and fraud victims as stupid, and at fault. In the meantime, while our attention is on why people are “so dumb,” these transnational crimes are increasing at an astonishing rate.
The massive wealth transfer that is happening is a big problem for all of us and we need change on many levels. I’m proposing that change starts with one of the first roadblocks: Victim-blaming and how it re-traumatizes scam and fraud victims.
How Much Money is Stolen By Scammers?
According to the most recent FTC report*, the amount reported stolen in 2023 was over $10 billion. This is over five times the $1.8 billion reported lost to scammers in 2019.
This is only the amount reported.
This is bad enough, and there is also a large, unknown number of people who do not report when they have been the victim of a scam. This makes it difficult to estimate the actual amount of people affected and amounts lost.
We don’t know how big this problem is, because victims don’t want to report it. They are already embarrassed and feel shame, and often can’t tolerate the possibility that someone will act or speak in a victim-blaming way towards them.
How Does This Impact Other People and Economies Worldwide?
The effects are much more than the money one person loses. We can’t figure out the full amount that was stolen from people and that makes it difficult enough. It is also difficult to know the full impact on a person’s well-being; one person’s well-being impacts their productivity (as well as that of others who care about them), which leads to the health of our world economies. These effects aren’t measurable in a precise way. However, we are able to consider different ways that people, workplaces, and families are affected. Each of us understands how these impact one person’s ability to function at their best and can then understand how this spreads to families, workplaces, and to the economy in a significant way.
The financial effects are bad enough when a person experiences a scam. The money a scammer takes from a victim means that the victim has less ability to spend and contribute to the health of their local economy. It also affects many areas of a person’s life including relationships, and the person’s physical and mental health. Frequently, there is a huge amount of shame, embarrassment, anger, and fear associated with being scammed. Relationships can be damaged and are sometimes destroyed.
Let’s focus in on what those can mean for a person:
- A person can have difficulty concentrating, make mistakes, or forget things. All of these affect the quality of their work, school performance, or ability to function in whatever occupation the person engages in. What if this goes so far that the person loses their job?
- It takes a long time for these things to get better.
- People that care about this person may be affected in similar ways out of worry or concern about the scam victim.
- If a relationship has been damaged or destroyed, both people may experience the effects above.
- Depending on the person’s work, co-workers may need to compensate for the scam victim’s inability to work at their usual competency, affecting co-workers’ productivity as well.
- Sometimes it is so overwhelming and terrible, the scam victim completes suicide, which means that all they contribute to the world is lost – in relationships and in work.
And so it goes. We can’t anticipate all the effects, but this list gives us a start at understanding the depth and spread of negative effects that can occur when one scam victim is impacted, and others are impacted in turn, and eventually entire economies are also impacted.
How Do The Things People Say and Their Beliefs About Scam Victims Make This Worse?
I speak to scam victims regularly in the work I do as a mental health counselor. There are many disturbing facts about scams, scammers, and the deep impact this experience can have. One of the most disturbing however, is realizing how damaging the stigma and victim-blaming are, which keep people quiet about what happened to them.
When a person does reveal this out of a need to get emotional support, file their taxes, report it to obtain help from law enforcement, or any number of reasons, they are often met with contempt. People are not shy at all about telling them how stupid they think the person is. Frequently, the person gets no help at all. As a result, all of those effects I touched on above become worse, including the length of time it takes to recover and heal.
Over the years, I’ve maintained a list of negative things people have said to scam victims, which I’ve shared with you below. These are word-for-word quotes spoken directly to a victim:
- The most frequent and damaging statement scam victims hear is: “How could you fall for that?” or similarly, “How could you be so stupid?” Victims hear this from financial professionals, law enforcement, mental health counselors, and family and friends.
- A mental health counselor, implying the person made a mistake: “You just need to forgive yourself.”
- From an FBI victim advocate to a person in their 70’s: “I guess, just get a job. You can get on Indeed and the company that hires you will train you.” (this minimizes how difficult this may be, and there is a lack of understanding of the the context for someone this age)
- A bank teller: “We don’t want to be your mule.” (Using the word “your” implies it is the victim causing this to happen)
- A bank manager: “You will never be able to bank here again.” (excluded from needed services for something that wasn’t their fault)
- A CPA: “It is your own fault. You didn’t tell anyone about it until now, and you gave them your money willingly.”
- A law enforcement detective’s report: “(Victim) was fully compliant with the scam.”
- From within a government victim compensation organization: “It isn’t a crime when the person chooses to give the scammer their money.”
- A mental health crisis center worker: “I don’t understand why you are calling me or what you need. Are you going to kill yourself?”
- Friends and family and many others:
“I would never fall for that.”
“I thought you were smart.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“We need to get you checked for dementia.”
“I guess it’s time to start looking at putting you in a home.”
“I can’t believe you did this to me.”
“People who get scammed must be the dumbest people on earth.”
“That will never happen to me.”
“No more LinkedIn for you.”
“You’re too trusting.”
“I guess you learned your lesson.”
“I told you so.”
Imagine any of these things being said to a person that was a victim of a different kind of crime, such as a man being assaulted and robbed leaving a grocery store. We would never say these things to that person, but people say them to scam victims. Nearly every scam victim who is willing to share what happened with others has heard some of the statements above.
Why do people blame scam victims?
There are several factors that affect our beliefs about scams and scammers. Most people are not aware that:
Scammers have extraordinary skills at lying, manipulation, persuasion, and using psychological factors to create situations that make a person more vulnerable. Scammers use manipulation and situational factors as skillfully as a weapon in a robbery to steal from people like you and me.
Scams are structured and systematic – meaning scammers use scripts that are written out to several pages, and are developed over time to be extremely effective; they train each other; and they are often playing a long game in building trust with a targeted person.
Scammers are frequently part of huge transnational crime organizations that have a lot of resources in the form of money and people, including people who have been trafficked and are forced to scam others.
Hindsight bias can cause a person to overestimate how clear a situation was at some point in the past – hearing about a scam situation and already knowing it is a scam can often lead a person to think that it was that obvious from the first moment.
There is a psychological tendency called the fundamental attribution error that means a person may tend to see unfortunate events in this way: if the bad situation happens to me, I tend to look for outside factors that caused this to happen to me and not look for reasons I may have caused it; if the bad situation happens to someone else, I tend to look for reasons the person caused this themselves.
Once you are aware of these factors, however, they are much easier to overcome. This allows each of us to revise our beliefs about scams, scammers, and scam victims and not blame the scam victim. It allows us to shift the focus to the fact that these are crimes and scammers are criminals causing a great deal of harm.
Then, we can better support scam victims and help them to evolve into scam survivors.
How Long Are We Going to Let Scammers Keep The Upper Hand?
There is work to do on a larger scale, too, to alleviate this problem. We are bleeding billions of dollars each year. Some ideas for change include:
- Let’s start calling a scam what it truly is, “transnational fraud.” Using the word scam immediately implies other words that have been used for a very long time such as duped, conned, or fooled, all focused on the victim not being smart or aware enough to avoid the crime. What we call scams today are perpetrated by huge transnational crime organizations;
- Strengthening the tools that law enforcement has available to them such as for cryptocurrency tracing;
- Strengthening our ability to work with other countries to track down, shut down, and prosecute scam organizations;
- Timely and accurate public alerts when a new form of scam is detected;
- Education about how scams work so that we support each other better and so that each of us is better able to detect a scam;
- Legislation that protects people such as the Online Dating Safety Act (HR6125) that was introduced in the United States Congress by Representatives Brittany Pettersen and David Valadeo, or the Tax Relief for Victims of Crimes, Scams, and Disasters Act introduced by Representatives Jamie Raskin and Jim McGovern;
- Allow for crime victim compensation to provide support for victims to receive counseling;
- And, Social media companies being held accountable for users’ safety and taking a more active role in deleting profiles that are reported, educating users on common scammer warning signs, and alerting users when warning signs are detected by the platform’s algorithms.
I hope that these ideas help you to support a loved one even more effectively than you would have already. I also hope that if a scam happens to you, these ideas allow you to state what you need and ask others not to use these phrases or similar ones.
Please share this article with everyone you can – the more we know, the more we can protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our economy!
Want to know more? Please check into the courses I have available if you know someone who is a victim of transnational fraud/a scam, or if you are in any kind of supportive role for people this has happened to! You get lifetime access and as I add more videos to the courses, you get access to those, too.
The link to the courses is https://lifepaths-school-7a8b.thinkific.com/collections/courses, just choose the one that fits your situation best.
Maybe you are just interested in protecting yourself by learning about the tactics these criminals use – that is in a course of it’s own, as well as part of each of the other courses and you’ll find it at that link above, too.
If you’re reading this after experiencing this kind of fraud yourself, please watch the videos on my YouTube channel (@createlifepaths). There’s a lot there to help you understand what is happening to you and know that you are not alone.
Cathy Wilson is a Licensed Professional Counselor who specializes in the emotional impact of being scammed and how to recover. She is also an author, speaker, and educator on this topic for scam victims, their family and loved ones, and for professionals who offer support. You can find her online courses and other resources at https://www.ScamSurvivorHealing.com
© 2024 Cathy Wilson, LPC, ACS