Scammers know victim-blaming can be weaponized to suppress retribution

Jenny West was expecting the bill: around A$3,000 ($2,100) for emergency work on her hot water system in Sydney. She paid the invoice the day after it arrived, keen for the plumber to have the money before Christmas.

Days later, he asked if the payment was coming — but when West checked with her bank, the money was long gone. Hackers had seemingly installed malware on the plumber’s computer and doctored invoices to direct payments to their own account instead.

In hindsight, there had been a tiny clue. The email came from Hotmail, while the attached invoice listed a Bigpond address — a discrepancy West’s daughter, Sam, spotted only later.

“I said, ‘Oh, God, how could I miss that?’ I felt I should have known better,” says West, who’s 89 and still working as a voice coach. “It did make me feel a bit stupid.”

That instinct — to ask what you should have seen or done differently — is common among scam victims. For many, it develops into a deeper sense of shame: that the victim of a crime somehow did something wrong. Police, psychologists and antifraud groups increasingly see shame as more than an emotional consequence of scams; it’s part of the machinery that helps them work, isolating victims, suppressing reporting and leaving them vulnerable to being scammed again. Breaking that cycle, they argue, requires changing not just how people recognize scams but how we respond when someone falls for one.

The Scam Paradox

Fraud is often imagined as something that happens to somebody else: the elderly, the lonely, the technologically inept, the excessively trusting. Yet scams are designed to exploit ordinary human behavior — trust in authority, fear of consequences, the desire for love or financial security, and the tendency to make worse decisions when rushed or distressed.

That helps explain why scams cut across generations and cultures. Older people tend to lose more money per scam, but plenty of younger people are also victims. Their shame can come mixed with wounded pride: Surely they should have been more tech-savvy. Surely this shouldn’t happen to them.

But vulnerability to a scam often has less to do with who you are than the circumstances you’re in when you fall prey to it. Scammers rarely find us on a good day. They find us when we’re tired, stressed or distracted — and the scams frequently manufacture urgency of their own: a payment that must be made now, an opportunity about to disappear, a threat of penalties or even arrest. In that moment, we’re expected to recall the many dozens of scams that now exist and spot the deception, even as artificial intelligence makes it easier to produce convincing messages, voices and images.

Once those emotions take hold, experts say it can be extremely difficult to slow someone down. People shrug off warnings. Sometimes they ignore someone standing beside them telling them directly they are being scammed.

Xue Yin Peh, an intelligence analyst who spends her days examining the crypto trail in scams, knows this from experience. She was recently sitting beside a friend in Singapore as he was being scammed over the telephone.

The scammers presented her friend with a fake arrest warrant online, and told him by phone it was related to a sensitive police investigation and that he could not speak to anyone else. They told him he needed to transfer money to an account with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the central bank, to clear his name. Xue could tell from her friend’s increasingly panicked responses that something was wrong and sought to intervene, but he kept telling her he couldn’t talk about the details.

“The whole time I was like, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it, I think this is a scam, don’t do it,’” says Xue, who worked for Chainalysis, a blockchain data and analytics company that helps track cryptocurrency transactions, and now conducts research on the same issues independently. But her friend kept going and “was very convinced.”

Afterwards, on realizing he’d been scammed, her friend “felt like, ‘Oh, so ashamed, I can’t believe I fell victim to that, and I can’t believe there was somebody beside me who told me not to do it, and I still did it,’” Xue says.

The episode captures a contradiction at the heart of scam prevention. At the very moment a victim most needs another person to interrupt the scam, the criminal is often working to isolate them — demanding secrecy, manufacturing urgency or convincing them that outsiders cannot be trusted. After the scam is exposed, a judgmental response from family or friends can reinforce that isolation.

Lim Boon Leng, a Singapore-based psychiatrist, has seen scam victims left with long-term mental trauma. In the immediate aftermath, he says it’s important for people to be supportive and take care with how they react.

“How we roll our eyes, how we throw our head back or throw our arms in despair or just a look of disdain. Sometimes the first reaction may not be the most appropriate,” he says. “The keyword, of course, is to be empathetic; it’s not just sympathy or ‘I’m so sorry this happened,’ but empathy, the ability to step into a person’s shoes and understand that this can happen to everyone.”

Treating someone as the victim of a crime rather than the author of a foolish mistake makes it easier to talk openly about what happened. And those conversations can help prevent others from falling prey, giving them real experiences to recognize rather than a generic warning to be careful.

Breaking the Cycle

For years much of scam prevention has focused on the moment before money moves: warnings from banks, pop-ups on phones urging people to stop and check. But experts increasingly argue that preventing fraud also means reducing the shame that can keep victims silent. That depends not only on whether people recognize a scam but whether they feel able to talk about what is happening — and whether those around them respond without judgment.

That may require changing the way people are taught about scams in the first place. Erin West, a former prosecutor who founded the US antiscam group Operation Shamrock, and Kathy Stokes, senior director for fraud prevention programs at AARP, previously known as the American Association of Retired Persons, argue that education campaigns have too often focused on not being a fool or not “falling for” something. Instead, they say scam-prevention efforts should start by telling people that they are victims often being targeted by sophisticated transnational criminals, who commonly operate in well-trained gangs and that being deceived isn’t their fault.

“Shame is one of the most important parts of the chain,” West says. “It’s frustrating to see a loved one get scammed, but we’re not walking in their shoes. I just think the enemy is very clever, and we are no match for people whose occupation is to steal our money.”

Known global losses from organized fraud are estimated at $442 billion a year, and Interpol says it’s the fastest-growing and most pervasive forms of transnational organized crime. But because shame suppresses reporting, the true amount is likely far higher. Victims trying to fix things on their own, often in a state of agitation, can also be vulnerable to being scammed again by criminals posing as recovery agents, lawyers or police. Then there are costs that don’t appear in the fraud statistics: time off work, depression, anxiety and even suicide.

“Do people feel ashamed when their car is broken into? Do they feel ashamed when their house is burgled? I think the answer’s no,” says Nick Court, director of task force coordination at Interpol in Lyon, France. “Do people feel ashamed if they’re the victim of fraud? Often the answer is yes, and that has a massive impact on every element. It has an impact on reporting. It has an impact on support from their family. It has an impact on what law enforcement can do about it.”

But talking openly about scams can be harder in some communities than others. Shame is shaped by culture, family expectations and attitudes toward authority, meaning the victims of the same fraud can encounter very different barriers to disclosure. Criminals can exploit those social structures just as deliberately as they exploit a weakness in a computer system.

Operation Shamrock’s West says being scammed may be seen as particularly shameful, for example, in some Chinese American and Vietnamese American communities — and scammers know it.

Jenny West was unable to recoup the money the scammers stole. She also paid her plumber at least some of the amount to cover his costs. “I just felt angry, and when I understood how it was done, I knew I should have been more careful,” she says. “But I thought I will be more careful next time.”

Still, she contrasts her response with some of her friends who’ve been scammed and ended up in tears, blaming themselves. Some have become depressed in the aftermath. Some have become less trusting.

“I can understand that they feel shame, but it still isn’t their fault,” she says. “I think, ‘Keep your mind open and don’t hide things that you don’t need to hide, just because of the public image you think perhaps has been knocked a bit sideways.”

This story was featured in Bloomberg’s Weekend section.

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Rosalind Mathieson is chief Asia correspondent for Bloomberg News. She previously oversaw Bloomberg’s political coverage globally and worked at Dow Jones/WSJ in Asia as an editor and a columnist.