Romance scammers/Catfishing
Instagram can serve as a platform, where you can meet the love of your life. Lamphere and Lucas (2019), state that nowadays online dating apps are not the only places to find a partner for life, but it goes along with Instagram, Facebook and other social media, where by using different methods people can find others with common interests and chat with them. Because of this new way of getting along with one another through social media platforms, the new scam has appeared, which is called "catfishing".
"Catfish", who is obviously a person, creates a fake profile and his main goal is to "fraudulently seduce someone" (Lamphere & Lucas, 2019).
This handbook by Lamphere and Lucas is a useful and interesting tool, that describes in details all the ways that scammers choose in order to fraud social media users, provides readers with statistics of those, who became victims once and much more information about online romance scams.
"It is important to understand the difference between these types of online dating victimization, as the motivation of the scammer and the potential for victimization varies greatly depending on the type of scam a person fall victim to." (Lamphere & Lucas, 2019)
Sources:
Lamphere, R.D. & Lucas, K.T. (2019). Online Romance in the 21st Century. Handbook of Research on Deception, Fake News, and Misinformation Online, 475. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4e7b/12ea04ec9fafa740414016952b4e811e0aa8.pdf
Hi, I find the topic of this post very current and important because especially now, many people do not have the opportunity to meet in person because of the pandemic. Instead, they use social media for finding relationships/friendships and many of them are not aware of scams and cat fishing. I think it is important to talk about and be aware of this topic because it can hurt people's feelings and can transform sensitive people to emotionally unavailable because of bad experiences.
I really enjoyed reading this post! :)