Newb Question

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Not quite a Newb Joined: 30 Oct 2011 Posts: 66

I've been collecting bank accounts the last couple months mostly from
loan scams. It's easy, fairly quick and hopefully painful. My question is after the fee is sent to the lad, would he take the money or would he try to get more money and how would it play out with a gullible victim? What's his script after that? Does anybody have actual knowledge of extended loan scams.
Just curious.

Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2012 11:56 pm

If you had really paid, there would always be more and more fees for this or that.

Not quite a Newb Joined: 30 Oct 2011 Posts: 66

I assumed that. I'm looking for hard evidence not speculation.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2012 12:00 am

Their format is very simple after a payment of fee:

1. Introduce complication
2. Offer solution in terms of payment
3. Accept payment and go back to step 1

419, romance, lottery, it's all the same: Dangle the carrot then introduce barriers. Lads will check their account if they think you've sent them 5 bucks. I certainly haven't read any baits extended due to this reason. If I find some emails sent to actual victims I'll be sure to update my post.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2012 12:56 am

Our sister site SW usually has many details about how the different scams work and unfortunately, usually many RL examples from victims.

Here is the overview of how one type of loan scam works and what happens after the vic pays: http://www.scamwarners.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=3161

Quote:

• The scammers claim that once the fee is paid the loan amount will be transferred into your bank account or that you will receive a check the next day.

• Of course, the funds never do get transferred to your account or the check never arrives.

• The scammers then say that another fee/payment is required or that the lending company changed its mind and they will need to find another lending company. Again you are asked to send via a wire transfer.

• If the victim decides to cancel the loan after the advance fee is paid, the scammers usually say that a refund will be made “next month”. A refund never arrives and eventually the telephone number is disconnected and/or the website closes and the victim is left with no way to contact the company.

Or like Seamless said, there will be another complication and another fee that needs to be paid to get the loan. Another document that needs to be certified or signed by someone and thus, more fees. Rinse and repeat.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2012 1:57 am

What happens after the initial payment varies. Some scammers do stop at one payment and move on to the next victim. Most don't.

For the cookie-cutter fake loan companies that come up repeatedly, the most common scenario is an initial payment, followed by the scammer suddenly realizing the victim has bad credit / is high risk, and he/she needs to pay for insurance before the loan will be granted.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2012 2:07 am

Thank you Dora and Dorothy ,very good explanations. Thank you for all the minute details of this type of scam. 2ND Amendment, I was not speculating, just speaking from experience but I neglected going into all the details for you.

Not quite a Newb Joined: 30 Oct 2011 Posts: 66

Thanks guys. I appreciate the info.

419Eater is my life Joined: 22 Jan 2010 Posts: 329

It is, really, more or less the same as any other sort of lad scam, I suppose- once they pay up, keep introducing delays that require further payment.

A lot of victims do indeed get suspicious and stop paying after the first or second round, but unfortunately some of them keep paying up, and these victims often reach a stage where they feel like they've invested so much in the "transaction" that they can't back out, especially when the reward seems so close.

You might notice that a lot of lads are now initially requesting small amounts of money (normally a few hundred), rather than requesting thousands up-front like they used to. This is partly because most victims will be more likely to pay a smaller "fee" early on, and the more gullible ones will get sucked in and pay more later- asking for thousands too early scares many victims off.

What's ironic is that baiting often works on much the same principle as the scam itself- delay the payment, offer a solution involving effort on the part of the lad, and repeat as many times as possible. Again, the intended aim is that the lad has already invested a lot of time and effort into this victim, and hence becomes unwilling to drop him.

Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2012 6:47 pm

I completely agree with you about the way in which baiting uses exactly the same mechanisms as the scamming the lads do, but I beg to differ on the question of it being "ironic".

It's a well-documented aspect of psychological behaviour that people - even very "clever" people - will often continue to throw good money after bad, and the risk of their throwing MORE money is increased with the amount of money already paid. In the case of baiting lads, it's not money, so much as time and effort, though in that case it is often the promise of ever-increasing rewards for the lad that provides the other half of the incentive to continue being baited.

In psychological terms, it's called "irrational escalation", and in a business context, a "sunk cost fallacy".

In a more person-centred context, it's about what is often called "cognitive dissonance" - the difficulty we experience in dealing with the evidence in front of us when accepting what that evidence represents means acknowledging something uncomfortable.

So the scam victim who's forked over £500, or the lad who's invested hours of his time, in pursuit of an increasingly (from a rational perspective) illusory goal, finds it increasingly difficult to square the increasing evidence that he's being stitched up, and is left with the only other course of action - to "prove wrong" his experience by investing further effort/time/money in the bait/scam, in order to lessen the dissonance between the reality of the situation and his expectations of it.

(as you might guess, I work with this kind of stuff for a living Smile

).

We often see the scam victims and lads as "stupid" for being so gullible, but we should be careful: most of us, if we are caught the right way, and if the gradient is gentle enough, can just as easily be suckered into similar tricks - indeed, it is often the case that the more intelligent and "rational" we are, the more at risk we become. Genuinely stupid people often have lower expectations of their reasoning capabilities, and can square the circle more easily, so are more likely to just walk away - people who think of themselves as intelligent and rational have, in some ways, much more to lose by accepting that they have made "stupid" choices, and are much more at risk of pressing on with a course of action that experience would tell them, if they stood back and set their biases aside, was catastrophic.

The logical conclusion of this is the company director who squanders his entire retirement fund on 419 scams, or a lad like H3ctor - someone who is clearly quite creative, and probably not stupid at all, who can be led by the nose with a combination of pointing out how foolishly his decisions so far have been and the promise of ever-escalating rewards just over the horizon.

Oooer, I seem to have got into my stride a bit, there! Smile