How I Got Scammed Twice: Love Scammers’ Tactics You Need To Know

Kel­ly’ was a finan­cial con­sul­tant who fell vic­tim to two ‘pig-butcher­ing’ scams — a mash-up of romance and invest­ment scams run by Asia-based syn­di­cates. Both were men she met on Insta­gram and then chat­ted with on What­sApp. She lost a total of about S$35,000 to them. Though she was wary after the first scam, she reveals how the sec­ond scam­mer got past her guard with emo­tion­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal manip­u­la­tion. He even spoke to and got close to her kids, and got to know all sorts of inti­mate details of her life. He only brought up an invest­ment ‘pro­pos­al’ two months into their online rela­tion­ship. Besides tai­lor­ing their scripts to each vic­tim — through detailed analy­sis of the victim’s chat behav­iour and social media — scam­mers con­stant­ly change up their tac­tics to snare even wary prey. By shar­ing her sto­ry, ‘Kel­ly’ hopes to warn peo­ple that even edu­cat­ed or finan­cial­ly savvy pro­fes­sion­als may be tak­en in. She now vol­un­teers with the Glob­al Anti-Scam Orga­ni­za­tion (GASO) to expose scam­mers and help vic­tims.