What Money Can Do: Examining the Effects of Rewards on Online Romance Fraudsters’ Deceptive Strategies

ABSTRACT

With the advent of the internet, romance fraud – or instances wherein individuals use fake identities and sham romantic relationships to defraud others – has moved online. Victims of this crime experience harms to their financial, social, and personal well-being. While researchers have made strides in exploring this crime from the perspective of victims, little research has investigated it using data drawn from the persons committing the crime. Moreover, little is known about how these offenders may alter their strategies in response to variations in perceived reward. In this study, we explore these processes utilizing data collected via a series of sequential e-mail exchanges with 94 online romance fraudsters. More specifically, we investigate the deception strategies used by these fraudsters and examine whether and how these strategies shift in response to changes in the prospect of receiving financial reward from a victim. Our results add to current understanding of online romance fraud and have implications for theories of interpersonal deception and rational choice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Our full research design was approved by the Georgia State University Institutional Review Board (IRB).

² Quotes from the fraudsters’ responses are presented verbatim and, as such, contain uncorrected spelling and grammatical errors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy Dickinson

Timothy Dickinson is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama. His work focuses on exploring how various elements influence the decisions, actions, and identities of persons involved in criminal activity.

Fangzhou Wang

Fangzhou Wang is a PhD student in Department of Criminal Justice/Criminology at the Georgia State University. Fang is also an incoming assistant professor at University of Texas-Arlington in Fall 2023. Her main research interests involve online fraud, romance scam, human factors in cybercrime and criminology theory.

David Maimon

David Maimon is a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Georgia State University. His current research focuses on computer hacking and the progression of system trespassing events, computer networks vulnerabilities to cyber attacks, and decision-making process in cyber space. He is also conducting research on intellectual property and cyber fraud.