Chances are you’ve encountered a scammer recently—probably more than one, either on the phone, via email, or on a social media network. There were 2.6 million fraud reports filed last year alone, and people reported losing $10 billion to scammers. It can seem like every other message you get is a Romance Scammer, a Pig Butcherer, or an Impostor Scam. And you might think that you’d never fall for one—but you definitely can.
That’s because scammers use a wide range of psychological tricks to confuse you and convince you to make decisions that will likely seem incredible to you in retrospect. In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to find yourself manipulated, and if you ever accidentally engage with a scammer you will likely experience one or more of these psychological tricks scammers use to keep you off balance.
Appeal to authority
Scammers often impersonate people in authority—government officials, law enforcement officers, or expert professionals. We’re all trained to defer to folks in charge, and scammers leverage that to shut down any resistance we might have to what we’re being told to do. After all, if the cops are on the phone telling you that you missed a court date and must pay a fine or be immediately arrested, our instinct is to do as we’re told to stay out of trouble.
This also leverages something called the Halo Effect—a tendency to let a positive first impression influence how we perceive subsequent interactions. If someone establishes themselves as an authority figure, we’re more likely to go along with their commands even if they’re strange—like when a police officer instructs you to stay on the phone while you buy gift cards to pay a fine.
What to watch for: If someone claiming to be a figure in authority resists any attempt to fact-check them—by claiming that you’ll be arrested if you hang up, or that there’s no time to verify their claims—you should be very suspicious. Legitimate authorities will have no problem with you conducting reasonable verification.
Time pressure
Scammers want you to use the emotional, instinctive side of your brain, so they often try to use scarcity and fear to pressure you into doing what they want. Scams are often presented as limited opportunities, either in terms of time or supply, immediately putting you in a more emotional state because you don’t want to miss out. This works even if the benefit you’re being offered wasn’t even on your radar a few moments ago—the moment you’re told you could have something, your emotional response is to protect that benefit, often overriding your more rational thought processes.
Another way this gets implemented is with Delivery Scams or Fake Invoice Scams, which often include a convenient (and very fake) contact link or phone number you can easily click to make contact. Your emotional response to seeing a large invoice you never authorized drives you to click immediately to get the mistake resolved, so you don’t pause to think about verifying the contact information.
What to watch for: Any time you’re pressured to act immediately to resolve a problem or secure some benefit, stop yourself. No legitimate business ever requires you to make snap decisions like that.
Scammers know that people are often on guard against big, dramatic sums or anything involving heavy effort. So they use a technique known as “Foot-in-the-Door” to ease you into the scam. The way it works is simple: They initiate contact with a small, easy request—sometimes as simple as asking “Can I have two minutes of your time?” or asking you to answer a simple question. If you’ve ever been stopped on the street by someone collecting signatures and they start off with a question like “Do you love animals?” you’ve encountered the Foot-in-the-Door trick.
That first question is followed by a steady flow of additional requests—but you’re already in the mindset of acquiescing, and your agreement to earlier requests can make it difficult to justify a later refusal to cooperate. For example, if you’ve already agreed that a specific cause is worth supporting, refusing to then donate some money makes you feel like a liar.
This technique also uses the “Sunk Cost Fallacy.” Once you’ve invested time and emotional labor into answering questions and getting increasingly involved in a conversation, you’ll be less willing to just walk away or end the interaction without a result. Foot-in-the-Door can also be used in reverse—the scammer may open with a huge ask that is easy to refuse, then follow it up with a much smaller ask that suddenly seems reasonable in comparison.
What to watch for: Any time a stranger opens with a question without any warm-up or pleasantries, it’s time to slow things down on your end so you can think.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity is why civilization works—when someone does something for us, we feel a “social debt” to return the favor. Remarkably, this works even if we didn’t want what we received in the first place. This often comes in the form of a favor—a special price or special access offered to you because you seem like a nice person, but it can also be used subtly to keep you talking. The scammer will compliment you or express interest in you so they can establish a social debt—if someone asks you how your day is going, you might feel pressure to ask them as well, keeping you engaged. This can be used to generate mental fatigue—after you’ve been talking with a scammer for a long time, you can be worn down and easier to manipulate.
What to watch for: Spontaneous compliments or offers of favors from people you’ve never met should be a red flag that you’re about to encounter a reciprocal request and the scammer wants to make you feel indebted to them.
Love bombing
Romance scams are long-term hustles where scammers pretend to be an attractive, interested romantic partner who is sadly very far away and thus unable to meet in person. The scammer convinces their victim that they are in love, and then requests money in various forms to solve temporary problems—a car in need of repair or travel problems, for example.
When viewed from a distance, it might seem hard to believe that people don’t immediately become suspicious when their new friend demands money. But these scammers use what’s known as “love bombing” to overwhelm their victims emotionally and manipulate them. Love bombing starts with constant, dramatic expressions of affection, but then withholds that affection with no explanation, forcing the victim to work to regain that sense of adoration. Before you know it, you’re working hard to do whatever they want so you can regain your good standing with them.
What to watch for: If someone you’ve never met begins showering you with attention and praise, be suspicious. If they then seem to randomly go “cold” and become angry with you, you’re almost certainly being manipulated (or the person isn’t in a healthy emotional space—either way, it’s time to walk away).
Early wins
One technique that most Pig Butchering Scams utilize is the “early win,” which can be applied in other kinds of scams. The Early Win is simple: In order to gain your trust, the scammer will actually let you make some real money from them. In the classic Pig Butchering Scam, for example, you’re invited to invest in something, often a cryptocurrency scheme. You put in a small, safe amount of money you can afford to lose—but instead of being scammed out of that small amount, you actually get a profit, and you can even withdraw it from the scheme.
The Early Win is designed to gain trust. Once you actually make some small amount of profit, you’re more willing to risk increasing amounts. And the Early Wins will help convince you to keep investing more money even if you have trouble withdrawing funds from the scam in the future, because you’ve already seen “proof” that it’s legitimate.
What to watch for: If you’re pressured to test an investment scheme with a small amount of money and/or promised a “guaranteed” return, you might be getting fattened up like the proverbial pig.