We often hear other people telling us that old cliché when dating “she only wants you for your money”. This is commonly heard and discussed within different social circles, and back in our homeland by well-meaning and sometimes unhappy friends or relatives. However, if you have recently come to the realization that you have just come out of a romance scam, or you are still attempting to understand what went wrong and are attempting to put all the pieces together, you will probably come across many articles out there about learning to identify the warning signs, the “red flags” and what to look out for next time. But if you are new to dating someone online overseas, it is likely that this is not what it is.
You were probably manipulated by professionals
The item worth noting is that romance scammers are often far from opportunistic. They are typically well trained, organized and have many different operations in multiple countries around the world. It is big business. Many of these people are operating from written scripts, work shifts, and have been taught exactly what to say and how to act to get exactly what they want. Many of these schemes know exactly what they are doing. They understand how to build trust, create a sense of urgency, and make you feel special and chosen. The manipulation is often calculated and slow in duration, to build emotional connection, gain trust and later financially deceive. This is important because many people coming out of a romance scam are left with the thought “how could I have been so stupid?”.
Now, let us put this in context. This article is not intended for well-travelled expats and is not intended to deter people from dating and enjoying their lives. It is meant for expats who are new to travelling and probably flew into a new country and met someone on an online dating site within the first 3-6 months of living there and were later taken advantage of. It is also intended for people who have never travelled overseas and are lonely in the country they reside. Maybe, they are lonely or thought they would give overseas online dating a shot. Sometimes people who are lonely or seek connection meet someone else online, create a friendship, and as time goes by begin to send money overseas to assist that “special someone”. It may start off as a small request, “Can I have some load for my phone, so I can talk with you more?”, “My grandmother is sick, can you please send me some money,
the amount is up to you”. “My brother recently became unemployed and is unable to support the family, can you please help”. “My daughter needs to attend school next year, can you help me”, and the list goes on. However, over time the requests may become more frequent, and in time we may even become fully financially invested in someone and imagine a future life with them that never happens.
The grief is real – but the situation is complicated
The problem with what makes romance scam recovery so different is that the grief is real, and the loss is painful, but we are grieving someone who never truly existed. The conversations and relationship felt real, the sense of being understood by someone, feeling important, and or maybe you felt that for the first time in a long time you had met someone who really actually cared for us. The relationship felt real and genuine – but the person wasn’t, and this is what makes it so shocking and difficult for the brain to understand, and for us to accept. The
grief and rumination is real, even if the person wasn’t. The relationship was real and this is what matters.
Victims of romance scams will often experience a variety of emotions, which include, shame, embarrassment, anger, isolation, betrayal, depression, and anxiety. They could experience a loss of trust towards others, feel unsafe about initiating a new relationship or even begin
to doubt their own emotions and may even begin to wonder whether they can trust their own judgment. Shame can also be particularly brutal and force the individual to want to hide away.
Who exactly wants to tell friends or relatives that we were taken advantage of, or what exactly happened in the relationship? It can be humiliating and traumatic having to recount the experience. Therefore, some people never share what exactly happened
with others, and the thoughts keep carrying on quietly in the background. We may even play the conversations and situations that occurred within the relationship over and over in our minds trying to find out where we went wrong or when we should have seen it coming. Perhaps we begin to even blame ourselves and get trapped in cycles of sadness and grief. However, avoiding these thoughts and feelings can sometimes make things worse.
Why this experience can hit so differently
If you were living abroad when this happened, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Bali or somewhere else in South East Asia – this is an added layer that other people back in our country may not totally understand. The culture of different places is… well, different and so are the scams. You were already trying to navigate around in a new country and learning to deal with the culture shock, or a general sense of stress from being somewhere so different and attempting to manage the loneliness of expat life or your situation back at home. The transience of expat life, and people always passing through can be difficult to manage, or the distance from family or lack of support is difficult, and scammers know how to fill that gap. And if you are far from home, your usual support network is just not around, and sometimes we just want to handle things ourselves. But, you do not have to handle it alone. Whether you are not an expat and are in your home country and chose to meet someone online, or you are an expat who decided to live in another country and meet someone online, making the decision to meet someone new has nothing to do with what happened to you.
What recovery looks like
There is no fixed timeline for recovery unfortunately. Some people may feel absolutely horrible for the first few weeks, and others for months later when the shock of the situation wears off. Some people find the emotional loss difficult to process and others the financial loss. It varies from person to person.
A few things that can assist recovery
- Talking to someone about it can really help, especially if the person is not going to minimize, blame or shame us for our experience.
- Attempting to separate ourselves from the sense of loss from our inherent worth. Your ability to trust others and connect is not a character flaw. It is just the thing that people chose to exploit.
- Understanding that trust can return and that unhelpful beliefs can be resolved to improve our mood and perspective.
- The instinct to withdraw when we are sad, and grieving makes sense, but isolation tends to feed shame and or low mood and reduce motivation to engage in the activities we enjoy.
Self-blame
You may be reading this and be thinking “yes but I still should have known”. Research indicates our intelligence, level of education etc., does not protect us from romance scams. People can exploit human vulnerability, and tactics of professional scammers are usually designed to bypass rational scrutiny, by targeting our emotional needs.
What happened to you is genuinely traumatic and the grief and or the financial loss is real, including the damage to our ability to trust again.
If you are carrying a situation like this quietly it may be worth talking to someone who understands the weight of what you are going through.
At Kota Counselling, we work with expats and travelers across the region who are dealing with exactly this type of loss – betrayal, grief and the slow process of rebuilding our sense of trust again in others and in ourselves. If you would like to talk, it might be worth talking it through with someone who’s actually lived this kind of life rather than just read about it.
Ready to talk to someone who gets it? Book a confidential session with Kota Counselling.