Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - The Psychology Behind Catfishing

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Amidst the rise of dating apps and websites lurks a new form of deviance: online romance scams. In this episode, we interview Dr. Annabel Kuhn on the subject of online catfishing relationship scams. We discuss with Dr. Kuhn how to identify an online scammer, the personality types of both the scammer and the scammed, and how providers can help patients who have fallen victim to such a scam. By listening to this episode, you can earn 0.75 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Hello and welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. I'm here to talk about getting rid of burnout, increasing job satisfaction, and feeling like an expert in what you do. One thing that created a lot of burnout and angst for me was trying to get continued medical education right at the last minute. So why not join the CME membership and do CME while listening to this podcast? Go to Psychiatrypodcast.com, sign up, sign in, take the test, and the certification is emailed to you in seconds. All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Annabelle Kuhn. She is a psychiatry resident at Harvard South Shore. We will be talking about online dating scams and catfish stories today. I thought this would be an important topic because I've had a lot of patients that come in with these issues. Some were serious than others, some being scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. some just in these long-term romantic relationships with people that do not exist in real life and unaware until we probe into it further. So I thought this would be a good topic to go through.

And so Annabel has done some digging. So welcome to the podcast, Annabelle. Thank you. Great to be back. I think that a lot of my research relies my guilty pleasure, which is really bad reality TV shows. Happy to incorporate this in. But yeah, I also have had at least one patient who has been dealing with some of the stuff that we're going to talk about.

And it really impacts people's lives. So I think it's really important to talk about. Yeah. And it's actually more common than I realized in like looking up, like there was this one study. It was like they interviewed so many people and like a bunch of them had actually catfished other people or been catfish.

So I think it's more common than people realize. And I think it's going to be much more common as like deep fakes with AI get generated. Or just like if you look at like all of the filters that are available on TikTok and. Yeah, even on Zoom here, I was like looking at if you like click the three dots in the upper right, there's like choose video filter. And like it looks like most of them are kind of silly. who knows oh yeah absolutely no there was like so so yeah i mean it seems like every video streaming app is kind of developing like this artificial makeup generator or make you look make your skin look better stuff like that you know yes so um okay so why don't you start with the definition

of what it means to catfish someone yeah absolutely so the Miriam Webster Dictionary actually defines the word catfish as a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes. And David, you were just saying that you think there's like a different pop culture definition. Yeah, like if you look at catfish on TikTok, you'll see video after video of people doing makeup before and after. and it's some of the most like interesting viral content because you you see these these people like in their process of putting on the makeup and they they look so different when they finish than when they start right and it's also you can see this for guys as well you know like they'll put their height as like six foot two where they're really like five foot eight you know and they'll wear like these like shoes that make them look deceptively tall when like they're not really tall.

I don't know if you've seen those. Right, right. So it's it's different for different genders. Yeah, I think there's like different like beauty standards and like standards of what's considered attractive in today's society. And so people want to like maybe pretend that there's something they're not or seem more attractive to potential suitors or even just like to their followers. Right.

So there's like a subtle. There's the subtle catfish, like, I'm just going to enhance myself or change slight details. And then there's more of like the, you know, complete catfish where you're pretending to be someone, you're completely not. You're using someone's pictures that are not your own. And why don't we go through some of the most salacious catfish stories just to give some examples of these that we could find? Yeah.

So I think, am I allowed to say fat-ass? Yes, go ahead. Because we're quoting something, right? Go ahead. Yeah. So I think my favorite, I don't know if it's my favorite, but the most fascinating and I guess frankly, hilarious episode of Catfish.

And I feel bad for the guy, but there's this guy named Antoine, and he thought he was in a three-year relationship with a man named Tony. And it turned out to be his cousin, Carmen, the whole time. And when Carmen was confronted about this, she infamously stated, you shouldn't have called me a fat-ass Kelly Price and revealed that her three-year trick was an act of revenge. I guess Antoine had called her a fat-ass Kelly Price three years prior, and she sought revenge in a very cool way.

Yeah, so it's like a pretty impressive YouTube clip. We'll link it on our scholarly blog that we'll write on our website, which, which, which has lots of citations. There's actually been a lot of studies on catfishing. We'll get into those. But interestingly about this story is it's like a revenge catfish, right? It's revealed in the most kind of like interesting way. They're driving around looking for the real person.

And then it, and I don't think the TV crew knew about the catfish either, which was really interesting. Like so the TV group who was filming this, they were totally thrown off. when they found out that Carmen was catfishing Antoine. Yeah, the catfish was in the car the whole time. Right. Unbelievable. Okay.

Number two, I like the graphic that you generated here. Thank you. Yes. I thought it might help to help people understand what's going on here because there's a lot of moving parts. Here it is. Okay, so let's go to the birdman catfish. Yeah, so this one is so convoluted. Basically, there was this woman named Shelly Chartier, who lives in Canada, and she essentially

pretended to be two people and catfished the real person of the persona she was trying to create. One of these people was like an NBA player, Chris Anderson, otherwise known as Birdman. and so there was this like aspiring model named Paris Dunn who she also pretended to be in order to talk to the real Chris Birdman Anderson and then she pretended to be Birdman and then spoke to the real Paris Dunn. And the most bizarre part is that the real people met in person and did not know that they hadn't actually been talking to one another. Right. So she so she basically facilitates like, Every time that Paris Dunn thinks that she's texting the Birdman, she's really texting Shelly, who then takes that text and translates it to the Birdman and vice versa. And so it's like she's this in between and she's, I think, twisting the stories a little bit,

especially of Paris Dunn because Paris Dunn was underage. And so Birdman never knew that she was underage because. because she had hid that piece from the story. And then, so when it comes out that, you know, there was this relationship with the real pair of stunt and Birdman, you know, Birdman gets thrown into this legal gauntlet of hell where, you know, he gets accused of, well, underage sex and, you know, all this stuff.

And then through that investigation, it comes out, the real character of Shelley was behind it all. and facilitating this whole thing. She actually, I think, like, served time in prison for this. Yeah, and interestingly, she just seemed like she was a super lonely, kind of isolated person in the middle of Canada without a lot of human connection. When they, like, interviewed her, it seemed like she was just very, very lonely. Yeah.

Yeah. And, like, almost bored. Yeah. Bored and lonely. Yeah. Yeah. It kind of seemed like she did this just for fun. Yeah.

So, okay, let's go to the third one. The third one, so there was this new Netflix documentary about Mantaeo that was just released in August. And for those who don't know, he was the star of the Notre Dame football team. And he was dating a woman named Leney, who was a student at Stanford. And so their relationship was long distance because, you know, he was in Indiana. She was in California. And so Linnae told Mante that she was diagnosed with leukemia, but made Mante promise that he would continue playing football no matter what. And she, like, told, she passed away from leukemia.

And Mante Ateo continued playing football. And, you know, this was seen as like an inspiration to fans and, and, you know, other people who weren't even like into football they they thought this story was incredible but then as it turned out manseiteau never actually met this person in person and it turned out that lenae was not even a real person it was another person you know catfishing using someone else's pictures pretending to be some imaginary person named lenae and so you know this this caused a big scandal for manseiteo and really i don't think he he he could really clear his name of this.

And it was really tragic because, well, the other thing was that it turned out that the catfisher, like may or may not have been Manteio's family friend. And so that kind of came up and was like, oh, was he in on it for like attention? So it's very complicated and it's really tragic too. Yeah. And imagine, you know, I mean, I think he, I imagine he didn't know about. it and he thought he was really playing football in memory of this girl that he loved and who died I mean you you could fall in love with someone that you imagine and you meet online and

you have conversations with and so did you see the documentary no I didn't but go ahead oh it's very good yeah I would imagine that he didn't know either it's like a very honest guy just wanted to do football and do well in his career in life yeah okay so tell me about like the victim like what is the common victim of a catfish sure so victims are commonly lonely or inexperienced in love maybe they um have features on the autism spectrum they have high trait agreeableness and like maybe in the case for mantaita or maybe even birdman maybe there's a limited time for what would be a typical face-to-face relationship yeah And so a lot of the victims I see are more average-looking guys who are on these dating apps

who, unfortunately, some of them will never match to a normal person or, like, very rarely matched to a normal person. Or like an average-looking person. Or like an average. Sometimes they just don't match to normal people. What do you mean normal? Normal as in not catfish people. Oh, oh.

Like there's something about their profile maybe, and sometimes when I look at their profiles, it's like they don't really know how to put out a profile that would match a normal person, you know? And so they become like more commonly a victim to this sort of catfish thing. Sometimes they're often, yeah, lonely, inexperienced, and naive.

And one of the patients I had was super high trade agreeableness where like even after it was exposed that this guy was a Nigerian man who was very different than the actual person that was the profile, it's like she still remained like in connection. I call it the second level of the catfish and the con is to reveal that your true personhood and the person still wants to be in relationship to you. Wow. So it's...

Do you think that's because they are? they like just still want it to be true like the original fantasy or they're uh it's almost like the realness it's like they're super lonely and the real person i think knowing the real story almost creates a level of connection that seems more even and i and i think there's something of a trauma bond that gets created in that in that twist we can talk more about this as we go on. So yeah, and then I think, interestingly, as we talk about those three stories, you know, like one, yeah, it's a vengeful act, but often it's kind of like this socially anxious, bored person who, you know, is trying to have a relationship, but maybe has reasons why they can't

have normal relationships, and they're like trying to connect with other human beings in some way. Yeah. But I think the people who are trying to make money and trying to swindle people, they more embody the dark triad, you know, narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, you know, or they work for someone who embodies the dark triad. So, you know, nowadays, it's common to have like a little catfish farm where you have a group of like 20 or 30 people working in this. in this room every day like a normal job and their sole goal is to do these catfish relationships

overseas i've seen a number of videos where they're exposing them where they get into the the computers the security computers and you can see this like group of 30 people and they're like working like all of them cat doing catfish type stuff so kind of like a call center that is quite scary to think about um So tell me about this study that was published in August 2022. What did they find about the perpetrators and the targets? Yeah. So this study was kind of interesting.

There was a table that kind of had different data than what they discussed in the abstract. But they surveyed people who, like, had been catfish targets or perpetrators and explored demographic characteristics. And at least based on the table that was published, 15% of targets were men, 85% of targets were women. And of the perpetrators, 26% were men and 74% were women. The mean age for both perpetrator and target was around 24. Again, this is just of the people that they interviewed. And, yeah, of the people that they interviewed, 54% of the people that they interviewed, 54% of the targets were Hispanic or Latin, and 43% of the perpetrators were Hispanic or Latin.

And it just kind of goes down the list. On either side, most of the people interviewed were heterosexual or described themselves that way. Interestingly, most of them had at least some college, if not a bachelor's or graduate degree. And it looks like 58% of the perpetrators were students and 61% of the victims are students. So there was also like a slight propensity for people reporting that they're slightly religious on both sides. 40% of the perpetrators, 50% of the targets. And the majority did not have children, like 85%. The perpetrators didn't have children, 80% of the targets. I wonder what like exactly like their target audience was or like how they got these people in their study but yeah the most interesting thing about the study to me

was that the abstract was so different than the table yeah and i'm like how how did that even get through a peer review board okay let's keep moving so what is an online romance scam so criminals can initiate a fake romantic relationship with a victim online and it's from a perpetrator's perspective, it's almost easy because dating websites often promote a match between two individuals. And with this rise in online romance scams, one of these people may have like nefarious motifs. Anyway, so the scammer can create a fake profile in a social media site, dating app. used stolen photographs usually if someone like conventionally attractive and in this fake online relationship the scammer grooms their victim and develops a highly personal and intimate relationship

until they feel that the victim might be willing to send the scammer money and there there's a couple studies which describe internet fraud as a staged process with three different stages the first being plausibility so like the grooming process and two, interaction with a fraudster, and finally, three, losing money to the fraud. Yeah. And I don't know, do you want to say any more about, like, stage one? Like, what is plausibility or what does that entail? Yeah, I think that it's hard to say.

I feel like in so many catfish episodes I've watched, people are always like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this really attractive person is talking to me. but they seem to kind of go with it and think, yeah, like, well, why not? I have a lot going for me and sometimes that's true. And so it's just kind of like, it seems like many of the people don't really question, like, wow, this person looks like an absolute bottle. I've never seen this person in my town and they never really like question it further than that. Right. So maybe it's related to the high trade agreeableness of the, uh, of the, uh, of the, um, of the.

targets. Yeah, we're just, yeah, the loneliness, you know, the, uh, yeah, like just the and, you know, hope, the hopefulness. Like, I hope that this could be true. Finally, someone who seems to care, who's listening. There's a, there's a series on TikTok called catfishing the catfish and there's this guy that kind of pretends to, you know, be a victim in these catfish things. And he'll send like a picture of himself early on and it's like the ugliest picture he can possibly create, you know, it's like triple chin, like making a goofy smile. And the catfisher will be like, oh, you're so handsome, you know. And then, you know, the girl will send like a picture of herself and it's like, it's like absolute gorgeous person, right? Like, and they're like,

oh, I don't think I look very good, you know, but here it is, you know. And so there's kind of this like, pattern that you can start to see of, oh, you're so different, you're so kind. You know, if you're older, it's like, wow, I'm looking for a more mature man. If you're younger, it's like, oh, you know, I want someone I can have, you know, that's young and full of energy, you know. So it's kind of like whoever you are, they like that, right? They, they appreciate that and you feel respected and appreciated and also there's a like it seems like the responses that come are not right away like they'll wait a day or 45 minutes until the second response so it's like the responses are sort of leaked out slowly right like where it's kind of like there's this anticipation of reward

type of thing like oh is this person going to keep talking to me you know like so i was kind of thinking maybe it's maybe it's the opposite because like maybe for like non-catfishers like it takes a while to respond and but like for like the scammers like they want to they want to move things along to like get the money faster but maybe they're smarter than than I realize some some want to move towards money right away and some try to build the connection first and do like the long game and uh you know like sometimes they try to elicit you know like sometimes they try to elicit it a little bit of money like oh let's let's do a meetup you know if if they're in the same country like hey pay for my gas to come visit you and it's like you're not going to see that gas money

ever again buddy it's it's actually quite common like i've had a number of people tell me that same story like oh she wanted me to pay for her gas and then you know i paid for her gas and i never saw her and then i've seen that again and i'm like you know that's not a real person it's like Oh, that's rough. Okay, let's keep going. So the scammer will declare their love for the victim within weeks, right? Which is kind of unique. Yeah, a little fast from what I would think is within like normal limits.

But, you know, that kind of like further like perpetuates this like fantasy of, oh my gosh, this person is so in love with me so fast. This must be like a real thing. And then, yeah, like we were talking. talking about, like, they'll discuss the possibility of meeting in person and then, you know, postponed several times due to, like, fake emergencies or, like, some sort of desperate situation that they'll describe, like, they'll say, oh, I'm in the hospital or a close loved one passed away. Usually, this, like, emergency scenario is made up in order to manipulate the victim

to send money or to, like, help cover the emergency. And so like before that, before like getting to that point, sometimes the scammer might test the water, so to speak, and ask the victim for small gifts to see if they may be more willing to send something more expensive later down the road. Yeah. Any commonalities in how they want the money sent that you saw? It's usually like a wire transfer or maybe like through gift cards.

Yeah. Or something like this. And a lot of times people say, oh, like, the person they wanted me to send the money to, like, wasn't under their name because they, oh, they didn't have an ID or something like this. Like, the scammer tells them that, yeah, I don't have like an ID, so you have to send it to my neighbor. So it's a totally different name than what the target was was under the impression that the catfisher's name was. Yeah, I'm thinking I actually got almost catfished. Really? There was this crypto guru that I've been following and I posted a comment on one of his

Instagram posts and within like half an hour, he sent me a message on the, you know, he sent me a DM. And he was like, hey, man, saw your posts. Like, how are you doing? Like what kind of things you investing in? just started a conversation. And then after a little bit, I was like, huh, I thought I had sent him a message before. And like, why isn't that up top, you know? And so I looked and the name was subtly different.

And this fake person had 100,000 followers. So they had done some, like, bot thing to get fake followers. And they were just reposting all of the videos of this person. Oh my God. And so, you know, it was, it's kind of a, it's kind of a crypto catfish or whatever, you know, like investment catfish. And I'm sure they would have wanted to invest my money with their like group or whatever, tried to get some, my crypto sent to them or something like that or, you know, but it's just like, yeah, fake scammers, right? Fake scammers are all around us. I'm glad you realize it was a fake.

Oh, man. Okay. One thought that came to my mind when we're talking about this, like, how this, how this works was this guy, Andrew Tate. I sent you some of his videos. And so this guy was, I would consider, like, the top catfish of our modern era. And I think a lot of people, like, he told this story and how he got into this. He had like two girlfriends or, more than two girlfriends and he called them all together and he's like, hey, I'm going to set up this like intricate catfish ring and I want you to be a part of it. Four of them left and two remained. And so he like from Romania was having these girls basically try to get guys to fall in love with them and send money. And he found out that it was actually better for him to do all of the communication with the guys. So he would have the girls just on these, like, video chats with the guys while he was typing. And he created these kind of, like, ideal scenarios for men.

But he was the one catfishing the guys, right? So the girls' video, like, they were really talking to a real girl, but he was doing all the typing. And then throughout the day, he would continue communicating with these guys. And he went for being absolutely broke. Him and his brother were, like, absolutely broke, to, like, being multi-millionaires from doing this. They said that the most they pulled out of one guy was like a million dollars. Interestingly, he's telling this story and he's kind of bragging about it.

But I kind of like, I'm like, this is like incredibly manipulative, immoral. So I consider him like the biggest catfish of all time or the most successful catfish. I think he's like the biggest super villain of all time. It sounds like he's done a lot of questionable things. Well, that is one thing that he for sure did. And he for sure made that. I think that's how he made his first millions of dollars, catfishing other men,

and understanding how to do that. So anyways. Okay. I wonder, while you were talking about that, I was thinking about, have you ever seen, like, Chris Hanson? No. No. Oh, my gosh.

Okay. So they're, like, back in, like, the early 2000s, Chris Hansen, he's like a TV reporter. and he worked with this group who would essentially catfish pedophiles and convinced that to think that they were young children and they would lure them to this fake house and the cops would like bust these guys. Yeah, yeah, I've seen some of these. I didn't know what his name was. But he would get them to confess on videotape to what they were doing and then he'd turn that into the police. Yeah.

And a lot of the guys that he caught seemed very sort of psychologically immature people, like very, like, like, not fully, kind of like, I don't know if you remember the episode where Dr. Cummings talked about pedophilia, but they're like very psychologically immature people. So, yeah, very interesting. A positive use of catfishing. Yeah. Yeah. try if and I imagine he could potentially get in trouble too if if it turned out wrong I don't know but yeah okay so online romance scams

can be these kind of parisocial relationships tell me about that yeah so parissocial relationships are one-sided relationships um it could be like where somebody's really interested in a certain celebrity and you know the person who's not a celebrity knows what they think is everything about this person. They know where they grew up and they know how many movies they've done, but the celebrity doesn't know anything about the other person's existence, of course. And so in this type of online romance scam, the scammer who's often a female posts, nude pictures, videos of herself, maybe on a website called OnlyFans. And the victim, often a male, has to pay money to view these pictures and videos,

usually in the form of a monthly subscription. And the victims also pay money. Well, I'm not sure if it's really victimization. But we're on that later. The purchaser, let's say that, can also pay money to send messages to the only fan account woman, which is either ignored or sometimes responded to with like an automatic message that seems like it's possibly, like, personalized. Anyway, the reason I say that I'm not actually sure if this is a scam is,

like, I've, I'm kind of on the fence here. Like, in some ways, it's sometimes seen as a form of, like, female empowerment. And, like, being able to, like, there's arguments that, like, women are able to, like, use, like, their creativity and, like, their features in order to make money. and women make a lot of money from only fans. It's unbelievable. And it kind of seems like, I mean,

the men know what they're getting themselves into in this case, too, for the most part. So I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. What do you think? Well, I think it's playing on like, it's kind of like the next generation of porn or the democratization of porn, where you have the ability for people

to go out sort of on their own and not have a ton of people in between making all the money off of porn. So for the men, you know, I think they get pulled into these types of dynamics because they're wanting something more real than porn. It's more interactive than porn. And they can kind of have this fantasy that gets played out over time. But yeah, I think it's a, it is kind of a one-sided relationship because, you know, you are thinking a lot more about this person, this, and then they are thinking about you. And in the end, what they want is money. And in the end, what you want is sex or to fulfill some sort of like sexual desire

to stroke some, you know, sexual need. So, yeah, it's interesting. I'm more curious about it than anything else. I've, I don't know too much about that. Okay, so how to identify a online romance scammer? Yes, there are quite a few websites that are made to help people understand how to identify a scammer. And so I pulled some information from fight cybercrime.org and advocating for you.com, which is like advocating against romance scammers.

and they essentially, it boils down to five points. And so are you being scammed by your online lover? So first you would ask yourself, does it seem too good to be true? And for example, like maybe like this very attractive person messaged you first. And their profile might not align with what they've told you. Number two would be love bombing. So like we said earlier, professing their love after a short time.

I'm using terms of endearment. And yeah, with that, like, rarely using the victim's actual name, possibly because, you know, the catfish is scamming so many other people that they don't want to slip up and accidentally use the wrong name. So they just call everybody's sweetheart or love. I've also seen people, like, say, like, oh, you're my wife, which is a little unnerving. If someone were to call me that after me never having met them. in real life. But okay, let's take a pause there. What do you think of those two? Yeah, I think

they're there's sort of meeting some psychological need there of people's hopes and desires. And it can be, I'm thinking of my patients who have gone through this, it can be really hard to break them out of this. Like you as the therapist, as the psychiatrist, if you hear this, you may immediately think this is a scam of some sort. But this person can be very emotionally invested in this relationship. I remember one patient in particular in resident clinic that there was, like, his phone would go off multiple times during the session by this scammer sending him messages.

And it took about, like he was going to leave his wife for this scam. He had never met this person. She called him honey. And, you know, I think she, like, he was waiting for her to get her green card. and I think he had already sent her some money. And I'm not going to give too many of the details, obviously. But I think this is kind of a common experience. And then, you know, how do you help someone like that?

I think what we did was we tried to empathize with his desire and yearnings and loneliness and his current relationship while pointing out bluntly. Like, I'm not going to not stand by and allow someone. to fall into a scam, you know, that there were some things there that concerned me and that he should do, you know, that this is probably not a real person. Right. And, you know, it's interesting, like, if you say that so bluntly to someone, they may leave you as their therapist.

Like, they may choose that scam over you, their therapist. So it's a delicate, tight rope to walk. It's almost like, like, treating it as if it's a delusion and, like, not, like, like neither like confirming nor denying it maybe and like kind of but it's it's so hard because you clearly know that it's not real i think and it's hurting them i think that you could and potentially from building this episode i'm going to be sharing this episode with my clients who i think might be in an online scam you know it's kind of like there's there's certain telltale signs right sending gift cards is like no real person i've ever i've never heard of any dating interaction

where they ask you to send gift cards. I think that there's a lot of, a lot of these signs that, like, once you, I would empathize strongly with their yearnings for connection, their desires for connection, or even their love that they feel towards this person. But I think for something like this, it's worth being a little bit more blunt that there are some very strong signs that this is a scam. there was one person that I was seen early on, and it was in my cash pay practice, and I felt bad. This person wanted to see me for therapy.

I didn't think they could afford me. And so I referred them to someone else. And then so I would see them intermittently, like, every three months. And it came out that this person had lost, like, a lot of money. And I wonder, like, man, if I would have seen this person weekly and just, like, would I have been able to catch this sooner and saved them? like hundreds of thousands of dollars. So sometimes as a provider, like you may not even know that this is going on.

And so you may need to ask questions to sort of solicit like, oh, are you in any relationships, online relationships? Have you met the person? And just be blunt with the question. Like, have you, has the person ever asked for money?

What type of, like, you wouldn't ask this to like every single patient, but like what type of, what type of patient would you have? ask that to um i i ask every single patient are they in a relationship are they dating but when you like with everybody would you go deeper and be like is it online do you know them um i don't know i i don't say that i can't say that i have said that but i think that it could be like if if they're like yeah i've been dating someone for like three years then sometimes it just comes out you know that like

as you're hearing more about the relationship, you know, the sort of red flags go up. So, yeah, asking for money, setting up, asking them to set up a bank account, asking them to set up a crypto account to send crypto money, you know, and for, for, you know, other, there's often good reasons to need the money, like, oh, I'm, I have this business, you know, we're short this much money. If I can get this much money, I can unlock 10 times as much money and instantly pay you back, stuff like that, where it's like, oh, I really want to help this person out that I care about for a long time. Right. So, all right, let's talk about the personality traits of perpetrators of online romance scams. So what are some, so what are the things that they found in previous studies?

They found that the perpetrators have low agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness. One study found that only low conscientiousness was a significant predictor of catfish perpetration. It suggested that narcissism may be at play. And sort of impression, people high in impression management. Yeah, so just to remind people what low conscientiousness means, because that seems to be a pretty common finding here, is it's a domain of the big five personality type and people who are high in conscientiousness are high in like achievement striving orderliness people lower in conscientiousness tend to be the opposite so they're you know not orderly low responsibility low planning not as industrious and so you can imagine like the perpetrators

are low conscientious they're not usually highly organized or driven people. That's a common thread. Oh, this study was interesting, this Hall 2010, talking about what things are lied about? Yes, very interesting. So they found that men are more likely to

misrepresent personal assets, relationship goals, personal interests, and personal attributes, whereas women were more likely to represent their weight. What do you make of that? I think it tends, it's, it's something that's like a common threat of like just base attractiveness is sometimes financial assets for men, looks for women. And so, you know, even in these like TikTok catfish videos where the women are putting on excessive makeup.

And then the TikTok sort of catfish for men is more like appearing to have more money and, you know, lying about your height. And, yeah, the, this, it's, I, I have one story. I'm trying to, like, remove enough detail so I can tell it. But basically, a couple years into a relationship, a girl found out that the guy was not as wealthy as he said he was. Like, orders of magnitude lower. And it was, it was devastating because it was, like, a lie, but then she was also, like, so deep in the relationship. but I think the attractiveness was like you look at like 50 Shades of Gray or like these kind of like the archetypal sort of the billionaire mystery man like attractive like this is kind of like

that like archetype that can be seductive but catfish. Go ahead. What do you think? I think in some ways like maybe this is just a hypothesis but it seems like maybe men who are pretending to be very wealthy online or or even in real life, it feels like it extends that far. But it seems like it's kind of like a cop out. So they don't have to be as attractive. They don't have to be as like interesting or funny or have like a spectacular personality because they're saying, oh yeah, I have all this money.

So it kind of allows them to not be great in other areas. It's kind of blinding. It can be blinding of sorts. Yeah, I mean, and this is like, why do guys drive Lamborghinis or like, you know, sports cars? It's like, I think that there's this world of, you know, that can be attractive. It's, yeah, it's interesting. I think, you know, so girls can be catfished to maybe some of the things like that where guys can be catfish to, you know, some of these filters or, you know, some of these filters or. or other things that can make them imagine they're dating someone they're not, you know?

Yeah. But I think it goes into this thing of like your ideal that you're dating is not the real person, which when you find out that this person that you're dating or now having attachment with is not the person that you imagined, that can be very distressing. Very distressing. Yeah. send me like wonder what else what else are they lying about and it almost probably feels like a loss like when it comes out that it's not this person okay this next part part we're talking about

how scammers might use artificial intelligence for online romance scams so what did you find with that yeah i wonder if just like in the interest of time we should just kind of brush over this one and then talk about yeah the basic idea is that this will probably increase and as AI gets more sophisticated, just imagine them, just imagine you may be in a relationship with someone that's really just an AI bought. And so I think that the chance that online romance scams increase is pretty high. Yeah. Okay. Especially with AI getting smarter and smarter. Personality traits of victims of online romance scams. So what did you find there? So, the victims of fraud are most likely to be cooperative, greedy, gullible, or uncritical, careless, susceptible to flattery, easily intimidated, risk takers, generous, hold respect for authority and our overall good citizens.

And yeah, that is according to the authors of a chapter titled Personal Fraud, The Victims and the Scams. Interesting. Yeah. And then a 2013 study investigated the differences between people who did and did not report past compliance with scams. The study found that the principal differences were in the response to very high value incentives in the extent to which they reacted with positive emotions to the thought of winning a large prize. And also in their reliance on signs of like official. authority and within their self-confidence. Interesting. Okay. So it's like, it's like the, so like we were saying, like if you feel like you've won the jackpot with dating this person,

it's like, oh, wow, then it's like maybe you might take more risks or do things that you normally wouldn't do. Right. Okay, so let's talk about how to help people who are catfishers. Yeah. I think, like we discussed earlier, exploring their loneliness or what this catfisher is fulfilling for them is helpful. But yeah, when the study from August 2020 suggested that clinical approaches that facilitate deconstruction such as narrative therapy or exception seeking, such as solution-focused brief therapy, could be helpful to improve beliefs of mate value. So this is actually like focusing on the person that's catfishing. They're like creating the false identities. Yeah, yeah. So like they discussed ways to help like people who are catfishing and help people who are getting catfished.

And I think the the catfishers here that they're that they're trying to target are the ones that are more lonely, isolated, maybe not seeking. true relationships, but kind of creating these fantasies in order to engender connection, although they have to kind of like fake some part of themselves. And so trying to get them to come to a place where they can have real relationships is key. I think when we're thinking about more nefarious characters that might be catfishing for just pure money motives and maybe they're higher in psychopathy, those people are not going to respond to therapy. So, you know, as a clinician, you have to kind of assess who you're talking to. And I imagine someone who's high in psychopathy is not really going to want therapy either.

Because it's not about the attachments. It's about the money. So, yeah. Okay. How do you help victims who have fallen into online romance scams? And we'll finish with this. Yeah. So kind of similarly, you want to increase attachment security.

it may help to reduce tendency to alleviate anxiety and really just helping their self-confidence so that they feel better about themselves and are able to be more discerning with people in general. Yeah. So it's about how to help them connect in healthy ways with real people, how to build friendships and real relationships if they're struggling with them. that. I mean, some of the, some of the people that I've seen who are prone to these scams, like have zero friendships, zero, like, that are deep. And so it's like helping them

find real relationships and real, you know, and sometimes I take more of a coaching stance there and like, okay, if you're, if you're a young guy and you have like, like, you're just playing video games in isolation all day, it's like, okay, how do I get you to stop doing that and do things with other people where you can build real friendship. So yeah, and then, you know, pulling, pulling truth into their eyes in a way that they can move through it and just realize it's going to be, it's going to be an attachment loss to lose that relationship, even though it's not a real relationship because they've idealized and fallen, often fallen and loved with this fake person.

Yeah. and sometimes given money. So it's like it's hard for them to not believe it after they've given money because they're invested financially in something. It's hard for them to see reality. So you as the guide helping them through that. Absolutely. Well, I think we're going to wrap it up there just for the sake of time.

Annabel, thank you so much for coming on and you did some amazing research. If you want to see these research studies, there's about 10 of them. They will be on our website, Psychiatrypodcast.com in the resource library. And I hope that you guys enjoyed this episode. And we will leave it there. Thank you.