Scammers will claim that they need a loan to pay for travel to get back home, to pay for a phone or computer so they can keep in touch, cover a major medical bill or anything else that may play upon the empathy of their victim. It often starts with something relatively inexpensive as a means of testing the waters, but can quickly escalate to large sums of money. When successful, the mentor gets 10 percent of whatever their recruit manages to siphon off from the victim.Īccording to a former scammer that spoke to Social Catfish regarding these efforts, about one in 10 people willingly surrender money. These newly recruited scammers make use of the playbook to try to take advantage of a victim. Mentors recruit workers, who are given access to the playbook, which has been fine-tuned time and time again after each scam to try to find approaches that consistently work. Santiago explained that the playbook is the result of a long-running operation that functions similar to a multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme.
They say all of the right things, and seem to have their life together - often talking up their own education or financial security to make it seem as though they don’t need anything from their victim or at least have the resources to pay them back. The victim quickly starts to fall for the scammer as they display charm and wit, compassion and kindness. The idea behind the scripts is to create the feeling of a whirlwind romance, the type of thing that you would see in a movie. There are dozens if not hundreds of examples of pre-crafted introductions, questions and responses meant to slowly trick a victim into falling for the scheme. Social Catfish warned that the scammers are “masterful storytellers,” and the playbook reveals how thorough that these scammers can be. They will often claim to be from the same area where their victim is located, but say that they are overseas work, school, religious obligations such as missionary work, military service or any number of other excuses. They create profiles with pictures of attractive people, typically stolen from other online profiles. When carrying out these schemes, the scammers create rather elaborate stories to lure in potential victims.
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