In the article “Do You Love Me? Psychological Characteristics of Romance Scam Victims”, the author, Monica Whitty, discusses the most well known type of mass-marketing fraud which is romance scams. Romance scams are different from your typical scams because the victims usually report feeling what Whitty calls “ a double hit” (Whitty). The double hit for the victim is a feeling of the loss of a relationship and a financial loss (Whitty). While many people think that this will never affect them, according to a study done in the United Kingdom “citizens are 10 times more likely to be robbed while at their computer by a criminal-based overseas than to fall victim of theft” (Whitty). As online scams are becoming more frequent, the amount of people they are affecting are increasing. People are losing money and they are left feeling used after the scam was done. 

  In the article Whitty focused on many different hypotheses for her experiment. The hypotheses were focused on age, gender, education, how much they knew about cybersecurity, impulsivity, locus of control, gullibility, trustworthy individuals, how kind they are, greed, and addictive disposition (Whitty). With a sample of 11,780 participants she learned that 200 had been scammed by romance scams (Whitty). To get her results she used different questionnaires and surveys to see where the participants fell at. In her research she was able to discover things like that contrary to popular belief, middle aged people were more likely to fall for the scams than the elderly.

While reading this article I found a lot of interesting facts. For example, I thought that the people who were most likely to fall for these scams would be the ederly, but the experiment showed that it is middle aged people. I enjoyed reading this article because it went deeper than just age and gender. Whitty went way more in depth that I would’ve thought about. Adding factors like how impulsive a person is and how much they trust strangers really opens your eyes about how serious romance scams are and how they can affect anyone on the internet. Romance scams are just as important as any other scams, but they are harder for the victim to get justice because it is harder to figure out who is on the other side of the screen. Sometimes the person doing the scam is across the globe and if that is the case there is little to nothing that can be done for the victim. The more research that is being done about mass-marketing fraud the more likely people will be able to pay attention to the signs and hopefully will not fall for the scams. 

Using the findings from this article can help people who are studying the effects and the risk factors of romance scams tremendously. Being scammed in any form is awful, but when you throw people’s emotions into it they feel twice as worse. Due to the amount of people that fall for it, romance scams aren’t going anywhere. Hopefully as more research like Whitty comes out more people will understand how to avoid being victims of crimes like this. 

Work Cited

Whitty, Monica T. “Do You Love Me? Psychological Characteristics of Romance Scam Victims.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, vol. 21, no. 2, 2018, pp. 105–109., https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2016.0729.