“Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre” was that wry observation made by the protagonist in American writer Philip Roth’s novel Everyman, which chronicles the misdeeds, despair and losses that come with growing old. Among the indignities of ageing must surely include being targeted as an easy mark for a scam – a threat that’s heightened these days by technology making it difficult to tell online if someone is real.
Older people are disproportionately targeted for scams because they are perceived to have more money, to be less savvy with technology, and more likely to have cognitive decline and deficits.
Studies have linked susceptibility to scams in older adults with lower cognitive functioning, including mild cognitive impairment and early signs of dementia, as well as changes in certain brain structures which render them less able to infer the thoughts or intentions of others, and hence less able to assess a risky situation.
The elderly may also be more susceptible to the mind games that scammers are so adept at playing – creating a sense of urgency or stirring up excitement over the prospects of a money-making scheme or a new romance.
In October, The New York Times reported on
the travails of Alfred, a 79-year-old widower and Chris, his 47-year-old son.
Alfred, who had endured significant losses in his life, was duped into believing he was in a romance with a female wrestling star called Alexa Bliss. Over the course of several years, he gave away a million dollars to the online impostor and a cast of fraudsters. The amount included his entire retirement savings and his granddaughter’s college fund.
Realising this, Chris tried to protect his father by moving his remaining savings to a secure account. Incensed, Alfred sued Chris to regain control of his money plus interest and legal fees. Desperate but undaunted, Chris sought help from eldercare professionals, set up financial safeguards, and took legal measures to control Alfred’s funds. By the time Chris wrested back control of his father’s remaining funds, they were largely wiped out. Alfred was also at the point of selling his house to obtain more money for the fake Alexa Bliss and had taken out personal loans with his car and television as collateral.
Among the different types of scams, the most pernicious and devastating is probably romance scams. The identities may vary but in essence the modus operandi involves manipulating emotionally vulnerable lonely individuals to gain their trust.
The scammers will claim to be someone – the paramour-to-be suitably endowed with attractive attributes – who is usually living abroad. They would quickly try to establish a bond, and the target would be groomed with expressions of intimacy and the promise of an imagined romantic future. Then comes the “crises” – one after another – followed by urgent requests for money. Whether it is to tide them over a made-up sudden job loss or a relative’s medical expenses, the scammers rely on a common playbook – extract money by appealing to their prey’s affection, anxiety and guilt.
Those who are ensnared would continue to give even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence that the person they think they’re in love with isn’t who they say they are and the money isn’t being used for what they say it’s being used for. Enraged at those whom they see as detractors, they would often pugnaciously defend the scammer and isolate themselves even more.
To anyone outside this bubble of fantasy, this total self-surrender and degree of credulousness and gullibility are incomprehensible, and they come with that inevitable question: How in the world do people continue to believe things like this?
In some ways, there are some similarities with people who have been brainwashed into a cult. Scam victims – like cult members – are caught up in the fantasies created by exploiters who also alienate them from their families and real-life existence – all the better to make them more psychologically and emotionally pliable.
The psychologist Leon Festinger had proposed the theory of “cognitive dissonance” to describe the sort of psychological manoeuvring that happens when an established belief is confronted by contradictory evidence.
In his classic study When Prophecy Fails, Festinger and his co-authors related what happened to a cult in the American Midwest when the prophecies of its leader, Dorothy Martin, did not materialise. Martin, a Chicago housewife, claimed to have been informed by extra-terrestrial beings that a cataclysmic flood would submerge America on Dec 21, 1954.
But she also assured her followers that before Doomsday struck, the faithful would be plucked to safety by a fleet of flying saucers. Ahead of the apocalypse, her followers who call themselves “the Seekers” quit their jobs, sold their houses and other possessions and abandoned disbelieving spouses in preparation for their departure.
When the time came and went with no aliens in sight, members of the group doubled down on their conviction and proselytising, before explaining the no-show by the aliens as proof of their success: Their unwavering belief had been rewarded with a postponement of the Day of Judgment. In the words of Festinger in his book: “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change… Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
When faced with cognitive dissonance as reality clashed with their deeply held convictions, the Seekers’ instinctive reaction was to hold on tighter to their belief and recalibrate reality to fit their world view. The same response can be seen in the resistance of scam victims today to appeals to cold logic and hard evidence.
We don’t usually deploy our intellect to dispassionately analyse and make sense of the world and often our emotionally derived concerns get in the way. We understand the world and even live our life through narratives, and a good story that speaks to us would resonate emotionally. What makes these stories more powerful is their promise: an answer to the problem of how to live at a particularly vulnerable time of our life.
Romance scams feed on an individual’s loss of purpose and feelings of loneliness that come from the loss of connection and community. Being humans, we crave intimacy, and without it, we wither. Loneliness is such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it even if these efforts might not be fully conscious or deliberate.
“For many people, what is going on is they are looking to fulfil an unmet need for companionship, an unmet need for a purpose,” said Dr Marti DeLiema, a gerontologist and assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work, who researches financial fraud and exploitation.
Researchers found that loneliness follows a U-shaped curve when tracked along our lifespan: Starting from young adulthood, self-reported loneliness tends to decline as people approach midlife only to climb again after the age of 60, becoming especially pronounced by around age 80.
People in midlife may feel more socially connected than other age groups because they are in employment and interacting with co-workers; they are more likely to be married and have children; and they are more likely and able to be engaged in social activities with friends and others in their community — relationships that feel stable and sustaining.
But as they get older, these opportunities and connections fall away: they retire, children grow up and move away, spouses and friends die, they are enfeebled and constrained by illnesses and disabilities. And when drifting unmoored in their lonely twilight years, they are sold a story that there is someone who loves and needs them, the power of fantasy can be a hard spell to break.
Before we view these hapless victims with derision, we should keep in mind that the vicissitudes of life could render any of us lonely and vulnerable. If we could fully understand how these people get duped and how some of them could break free, then maybe we might know what to do when something seems not right. The impetus to understand others is also an impetus to understand ourselves.
But for now, there is no such understanding and no effective countermeasure, which is evident with the introduction of the Protection from Scams Bill that gives police the powers to control the bank transactions of scam victims. It would probably have the intended effect of preserving whatever savings that the victims are left with, but it would not repair the effects of the aftermath: the humiliation, the dashed dreams and broken hearts; nor would it address the complexities of how these individuals ended up in this dire situation in the first place.
Much has been said about the detrimental effects of loneliness on physical and mental health – to which we should add the peril of being scammed. If we could rise to the social challenge, the policy challenge and the human challenge of finding ways to recognise these lonely people and to attend to them and care for them, then perhaps we can also better protect them from falling for the siren call of scammers.
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Professor Chong Siow Ann is a senior consultant psychiatrist at the Institute of Mental Health.
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