u/Kensi99

Today, I had to prove who I was in order to access information about myself on a federal government website. It took about 5 minutes. This proves that there is technology out there that can be used to keep scammers off or dramatically reduce their presence on social media and dating apps. These platforms simply do not wish to pay for it—which is a bit odd because it would do so much to increase their credibility with users. I wonder what exactly is behind them just not caring about it. The one time I tried to report a fake profile (of a celebrity, who was trying to phish me) to Instagram, I got to the end of its process and got an error message. Pointless.

I've known for years that my share of physical book sales (through Draft2Digital) is ghastly. I have even asked D2D to explain it and got back word salad. But every time I see my raw reports, it's a shock.

My books are priced at $15 or $16. Out of that, I make between 44 cents and a little over a dollar.

I have a busy full time job and no time to devote to opening my own store, selling from my website, etc. So basically I just don't pay any attention to physical book sales, and concentrate on digital, where I make about $2 on a book priced at $4.

But it's pretty crazy.

I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this, but there are a lot of similarities between the techniques that cults use to brainwash people and what scammers use. Cults always start off with love bombing (in fact that term was taken from a cult leader (the Moonies). Then you've got trauma bonding (all the various accidents, crises, danger, etc), isolating the victim from friends and family, intermittent rewards (disappearing when the victim doesn't send money) etc and so on.

Being brainwashed could go a long way towards explaining why victims keep sending money after being presented with facts that prove the love object isn't real. However, much like cult members, SA victims, and Stockholm Syndrome victims (all of which has improved somewhat in the past several years) there is a lot of blaming of the victim—telling them they were "volunteers not victims" etc. Also many victims claim to feel that they went into a kind of trance and basically got "addicted" to sending money and communication with the scammer(s).

There is some element of addiction here too and I've seen that discussed but haven't seen much about brainwashing. There are particular deprogramming techniques that are used with brainwashed people, and it may be useful to look into them if a friend or relative can't seem to disengage with their scammer(s).