The online romance scam: A complex two-layer scam

Online Romance scams are very successful unethical practices which cause considerable financial and emotional damage to their victims. This paper argues that the success of this scam technique is based on a strategy, similar to that in the Nigerian Letter scam, in which scammers invoke strong emotions in the recipients. We reflected on the notion that strong emotions play an important role in the development of normal romantic relationships, and these emotions are related to personal experiences of the individual which are accumulated in so-called 'personal love stories'. The personal love story is the individual's view of the idealized perfect relationship, and as such it impacts on the selection of a partner in the initiation stages of a partnership, and endures through the development of the relationship until its eventual termination. Personal love stories are important for the success of a relationship, and we assert in this paper that these love stories play an important role in the development of romance scam relationships and support the scammer's eventual demand for financial funds from the victim. This paper presents a theory which attempts to explain the success of romance scams as a 'two-layer scam', related first to establishing a faked relationship by addressing strong personal romantic emotions, and second to building spurious reasons to request significant monetary payments.