The Role Of Love Stories In Romance Scams: A Qualitative Analysis Of Fraudulent Profiles
Open accessAbstract
The Online Romance Scam is a very successful scam which causes considerable financial and emotional damage to its victims. In this paper, we provide a perspective that might be helpful to explain the success of this scam. In a similar way to the “The Nigerian letter”, we propose that the scam techniques appeal to strong emotions, which are clearly involved in Romantic relationships. We also assume that the same success factors found in normal relationships contribute to the success of the romance scam. In an exploratory study using a qualitative analysis of fraudulent profiles from an international dating website, we examined this assumption. The findings show that personal affinities related to personal romantic imaginations, which are described by personal love stories, play an important role in the success of a romance scam.
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- Authors
- Kopp, C., Layton, R., Sillitoe, J., & Gondal, I.
- Affiliations
- Federation University (AU)
- Venue
- Zenodo
- Publisher
- Zenodo
- Published
- 2016-06-22
- OpenAlex
- W2487857128
- Cited by
- 42
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 8 · 2018: 2
- FWCI
- 1.49
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- zenodo.org
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-sa
- creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
- Locations
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- FedUni ResearchOnline (Federation University Australia) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Spam and Phishing Detection
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Keywords
- love story, dating websites, emotional manipulation, romantic relationships
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