by Dotti
Mon Feb 22, 2010 11:18 am
Unfortunately, scammers are sometimes able to convince victims to withdraw their posts. The overwhelming majority of the time, this occurs in romance scams. It is a frequent enough occurrence that at least one forum dedicated to romance scams has eliminated users' ability to delete their own posts or edit them after a short period!
Scammers usually convince victims to retract their reports in one of 3 ways.
1) They tell more lies to the victim, once again convincing the victim that they are real and are just victims of circumstance. He may use other characters played by himself or an accomplice in his country or another country to assist in making these lies more believable. Sometimes, if he has video footage of the person he is impersonating (recorded from previous victim, or found online on a site such as U-tube, social networking sites, media site) he may fake a webcam to "prove" he is real. Often to those of us at a distance from the scammer, the lies are obvious and implausible, but a victim who has put his or her heart into what he/she believed is a real relationship wants to believe it is real, and is much more easily convinced as a result.
2) They threaten and/or blackmail the victim. In the first situation, they may threaten the life of the victim and/or her family. In the latter, they will often threaten to make public any information, photos, and/or video related to the victim. If the victim sent any compromising photos, the scammer will threaten to post them all over the internet or send them to her family. If the victim went on webcam with the scammer and the scammer convinced them to "perform" on camera, the scammer will claim that he recorded the scene and will post it all over the net or sell it to a porn site. Sometimes it is a bluff and the scammer hasn't recorded the webcam footage, but a panicked victim may not be willing to take that chance. Some scammers will continually push the victim to get on webcam specifically because they want some leverage for later! In this day and age, photos and video, once recorded, can haunt you forever! It is important that you keep this in mind whenever you are interacting with people online. What to do if you are threatened with harm or blackmail? If harm, report to your local police (in cases like this, when the scammer is in Nigeria, your risk is extremely low but it still makes sense to document any threats). If blackmail is involved, the victim has to decide how to handle it, but one thing to keep in mind is that a blackmailer will NEVER stop. If the victim allows him to have a hold over her, that hold will ALWAYS be there as there is no way to retrieve every copy of any pictures or video.
3) They "come clean." In this scenario, the scammer makes a "full confession" and usually claims justification for the scam by saying he/she was forced to do it by a desperate situation, or sometimes even by claiming the white victim deserved it because his/her people have oppressed the Africans for so long! He/she provides "real" information to the victim (most of the time some or all of this is even more fake information). He will claim that somewhere along the line, he really fell in love with the victim, and still wants to marry her. He will announce that he is going to stop scamming out of love for her! He will withdraw all money requests and may even promise to send the victim's money back once he can earn some more money. He may even offer the password to his email and/or dating site account to the victim to "prove" he is honest. The truth is, this is nothing more than a new set of lies and another tactic to get money. The scammer is still stringing along other victims using character names and emails the victim knows nothing about. Eventually, the scammer will once again find himself in desperate financial circumstances, and he will once again ask for money from the victim, claiming that he needs her help to survive without scamming. This whole approach is sort of the "hail Mary" pass of scamming--the victim is lost anyway, so he might as well throw the ball. The important thing to note is that while I have seen many scammer confessions that were supposedly driven by love, I have never seen this scenario end in a real relationship! Ultimately it always turns out that the scammer is still lying and/or trying to get money!
The victim, after retracting, often becomes angry with us for refusing to remove information about the scammer. He or she is either fully hooked or concerned about fallout. While we can understand and empathize, ultimately we have to consider the harm an incorrect claim of innocence may cause to other current and future victims. If we know beyond a doubt that the reported person is a scammer (in this case we know for certain that this is a scammer with an IP that places him in Nigeria) we will make sure he is still posted.
