Cruel, relentless online criminals leave behind enduring scars for family, friends

Try 'motivational interviewing' rather than direct confrontation but know - it might not work

Marti DeLiema

How relentless and cruel are online criminals? I recently heard a story about an elderly victim whose family took his phone and Internet access away so he could no longer talk to the criminals who were stealing his money. So they hired a taxi driver who traveled an hour to knock on this man's door and hand him a cell phone so they could continue to harass and steal from him. (More in a moment.)

That's the nature of the fight we're in, and that's the background for today's story, which is a little different. Perhaps you read my recent piece about Chris Mancinelli, whose father spent years trapped in a set of ongoing scams and -- try as he might -- he couldn't prevent dad from eventually giving away nearly $1 million to these criminals. Things got so bad that when Chris tried to block dad's access to the last $100,000, dad sued him. After regaining access to that last $100,000, and giving it all away, dad then died in a tragic accident.

It's one of the saddest stories we've told on The Perfect Scam, but also one of the most real. Many families are dealing with this kind of situation -- a family member or friend who is "under the ether" and won't stop communicating with a fake online lover, or a crypto scam criminal, or a caller who claims there's a warrant out for their arrest. As I've mentioned before, the problem is orders of magnitude larger than it was just a few years ago, thanks in part to all these tech tools that make life easier for criminals.

So what are family members and friends to do? Marti DeLiema is researching this important topic. She's a Professor at the University of Minnesota where she studies scams and their impact, especially on older adults. My interview with her appears in part two of this podcast, but I really want to highlight some of the things she told me, so here goes:

Sometimes, everything isn't enough: We've all had a friend who couldn't/wouldn't stop smoking even as their health declined, or couldn't end an abusive relationship. You can do all the right things but still fail to help your loved one. That's hard to accept, but you have to.

"You could only do so much, and I think you just have to come to terms with... the little that you can do and let the rest go," she told me.

She and others are starting to research "secondary trauma" caused by scams. Not only is the victim subject to financial and emotional distress, but the people around that victim suffer, too.

"The field is starting to talk about a secondary trauma because when you are trying to protect a person who is unwilling to be protected, when you're trying to fight against systems that are intractable and impossible to change," she said. "You start to lose hope, and then one of the symptoms of secondary trauma is lack of empathy, um, lack of drive, sleeplessness, stress, depression."

Criminals have more time than you. Keeping an open line of communication is important, and you should do that even if you feel despair. But criminals have a huge advantage here. Many call their online "lovers" five, six, or seven times a day...and you can't keep up with that.

"It's nearly impossible... how can you, a busy working adult manage to communicate with an older family member that many times per day," she told me, "Especially when you have competing priorities, like work, your own spouse, if you have children. It's really, really difficult. So I think that gives scammers an edge....it's their business model."

Trauma makes victims vulnerable. A really important point that came up in Chris' story is the context around his dad's situation. Alfred, the dad, was set up for failure by a series of tragedies that happened earlier in life. His daughter had died of leukemia when she was three; his wife died only a few years later. Many of the criminals who exploited Alfred said they were injured or sick and needed help paying medical bills. A therapist later said Alfred had unresolved trauma, and couldn't resist trying to help someone in need. These criminals are highly skilled at finding such weaknesses and exploiting them, Marti says.

"In my research and doing many interviews with victim survivors of fraud, we often hear these stories of early life events that might impact later life vulnerability to scams like the loss of a child, like the loss of a spouse," she said. "And oftentimes, as we age some of those life events become more common. You know it isn't unusual for an older adult to lose their spouse and become widowed. It's not unusual for an older adult to leave the workforce and you know try to have to find this moment to redefine themselves, find a sense of purpose, find new ways to build social connections. And I think that really just exposes them in some ways to make them more susceptible to scams that offer to fill that gap or that loss."

Loneliness, boredom play a big role. In a similar way, unmet needs often lay the groundwork for fraud. I've long observed that loneliness is one of the most powerful forces in the world -- it makes people do things they wouldn't normally do. It's certainly a contributing force to romance scams. But Marti told me the problems are more complex than that.

"I often talk about unmet needs. Boredom is one of those. A lack of purpose is another," she said. "Sometimes it can be financial, so you might be facing financial worries or insecurities and you're looking for that way to solve them, that get-rich-quick type way. Sometimes it, you might have a really busy social life but none of those social connections are romantic connections so you're looking for romantic partnerships, so that's an unmet need. I mean there's so many things that scammers have now specialized in and really crafted their methods and, and their messages to appeal to that unmet need and offer to really solve it for the person."

Try a different kind of conversation. One specific suggestion she had about helping a loved one involved changing the way you talk with them. It's only natural to want to shake someone, perhaps even get angry with them, and say, "Why can't you see this is fraud?" But that confrontational approach often fails. Another thing to try is what Marti calls "motivational interviewing." That means a lot more listening than talking.

"It's really using these certain guiding principles in kind of a back-and-forth conversational interview that you really help the subject of the interview tap into their own motivation for behavioral change," she said. "You try to get that person that you're speaking to, to really kind of identify what drives them to want to make a change and to kind of reveal the holes in the stories that they might have been telling themselves for a while.

"You know let's say that it's a scam where the criminal sent a bogus check, and the check was for more money than whatever the victim thought that they were being paid for. You know if you were trying to convince this person that that check might be fraudulent, you would say, you know why would this, you know, large company make such a big mistake on fraud? Why would they ask you, you know, a brand-new employee to send them back the money for differences? Can we talk more about that? …What do you think is going on here? And it's really meant to open up the conversation so that the person themselves can get to the same conclusion as the person who's interviewing them.

"And it really helps protect the person's feelings from feeling like they're being attacked or questioned. You're really working together. It seems like you're working together to get to the solution, but you're landscaping that conversation as the interviewer. You're really trying to get them to the same, to arrive at the same conclusion that you yourself have arrived at like, this is a scam.

One might be inclined to go "nuclear" in a situation like this and...take the Internet away from a victim in the middle of a scam. Change their cell phone number, turn off their WiFi, that kind of thing. But, remarkably, criminals have found their way around these kinds of tactics. It's important to understand just how relentless criminals can be. This story Marti told me....just blew me away.

"I was interviewed by a person whose family took away their smartphone, they convinced the family member, the victim survivor to go back to, you know your regular old flip phone. And they reluctantly did. And great, but guess what they started to do? He used his wife's smartphone.

"So he got on a family member's smartphone to continue the engagement. I mean I've heard of cases, and this is going back to the Elder Abuse Forensics Center, where the criminals were so desperate to get in touch with the victim whose phone number was changed, that they hired a driver ... to go to the victim's house, because the criminals had their address, and the cab driver, kind of an unwitting accomplice here, handed his own cellphone over to the older adult to have a conversation with the criminal.

"The length that they will go through to contact the victim or the target is just unreal, and I have heard recently that ... the changing the number tactic, the phone number doesn't work anymore. You know privacy is a myth, our information is out there, and you know just as easily as you can change your number, the new number will be in some database that they can buy and find you again. So you know, the old tactics that we used to use and used to find effective are not working anymore because of how interconnected we are, because of how much of our data is brokered and sold and traded."