Shownotes Transcript
They managed to extract about £20,000 from me. I was massively in love with this person. We were going to sail around the world, buy a yacht, sail around the world, live happily ever after. But of course it never happened. It was all absolutely fictitious. And the amount of...
Trouble they took to convince me that they were real is just unbelievable and so skilful. Nicky McLeod turned to an online chat room in search of company to ease her loneliness. And that was where Nicky met oil rig worker Alan Morgan. The pair spoke for months and formed a relationship. This is Nicky McLeod, a retired professor of neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh.
Nikki made both UK and international headlines earlier this year after revealing the harrowing discovery that a promising three-month relationship she had invested in emotionally and financially was in fact an elaborate online romance scam. We think it couldn't happen to us. We think we can spot the false profiles on Facebook and other social media platforms. But figures from Action Fraud, the UK's national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime, suggest otherwise.
These show that between January 2020 and December 2024, nearly 40,000 cases of dating fraud were reported, with total losses exceeding £400 million. And in the UK, more than half of online fraud cases reported relate to impersonation fraud, according to Ofcom, the UK independent communications regulator. Welcome to LSEIQ.
The podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. I'm Oliver Johnson from the iQ team. We work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas and talk to people affected by the issues we explore. In this episode, I ask: How do we avoid falling for online scams?
I find out what type of person falls for an online scam, who are the fraudsters, and how does colonialism motivate them? And what's the connection between criminality and pop music?
Let's return to Nicky, who told me how she had been joining different Facebook groups, looking for company at a difficult time in her life. I was joining all sorts of groups here, left, right and centre, to try and meet people, just to talk to and meet a new bunch of friends. I was chatting in these spaces on Facebook and suddenly this person popped up who looked really interesting. This person introduced themselves to Nicky as Alan Morgan, an oil rig engineer.
Okay, I know what you're thinking, but Alla had pictures and videos to back up her story. She even sent videos of herself speaking to Nikki.
Things progressed from there. We got on pretty well and she was incredibly attractive. And so I was really attractive to this person. We started talking and just chatting away and having a normal conversation like you'd have with anybody. And our life histories, she'd had a daughter, she'd lost a daughter during the COVID epidemic and
I'd recently lost my two children and we were a bit downtrodden from having lost our kids. And we just chatted away about the state of tea in China, that sort of stuff. Things were going well until Nicky and Ella's conversations hit a problem. And then she started telling me that, oh, she was losing her connection. She had a really poor connection on the internet for talking to people on Facebook or wherever. And would I buy her some Steam cards?
I had no idea what a Steam card was. Steam or gift cards are typically sold as vouchers for the online purchase of video games or digital products. Nicky spent several hundred pounds on them in her local branch of Curry's, the electrical store, before one of the sales assistants asked her why she was buying them.
They told her that Steam cards are a popular currency among scammers. With Nikki's suspicions alerted, Alla was keen to reassure her. She was, she said, going to come and visit.
And I thought, oh, this is wonderful. This gorgeous person is going to come and see me in Edinburgh. But for her to get to Edinburgh, I had to pay two and a half thousand dollars for a helicopter trip from an oil rig in the North Sea to come to see me in Edinburgh. She was going to land at Edinburgh Airport and then going to stay with me for two or three weeks on a vacation.
But then the HR department of her oil company wanted another 11 or 12 grand to compensate for her while she was coming to see me on holiday. And I refused to pay that. I said, this is bloody nonsense. No, I'm not going to pay that. So she never came, but I still lost two and a half grand.
Nicky had already paid the money for the helicopter trip, that Alla never took. But the extraordinary amount of money being requested by the oil rig's supposed HR department brought her to her senses. She wasn't going to pay any more. But still, her conversations with Alla continued. And then came an offer Nicky couldn't refuse.
And eventually our conversation, Kate, got around to the fact that my daughter was living up in Aberdeen. She was leaving her husband with one of my other daughters. I got two from a previous partner. And she asked me, oh,
Is she wanting to buy a house? I said, yeah, she is. She's leaving her husband. She's got nowhere to live. She said, oh, I can help you. I've got one and a half million dollars in my bank account. Would you like me to buy her this house? I said, yes, you bet. And so she gave me access to this bank account. Despite a suspiciously simple looking password, the bank account Nikki was directed to looked legitimate and did appear to hold one and a half million dollars.
She proceeded to try to withdraw $85,000, enough to buy a two-bed flat in Aberdeen. And when I did that, the bank account was suddenly frozen. And I got emails from the bank saying, oh, you need to pay $11,800 to unlock this bank account. And this person, Alan Morgan, said, oh, it's all right, just pay them. And I'll pay you back because I've got all this money. I'll pay you back. Don't worry about it.
Convinced everything was legitimate, Nikki began submitting payments via PayPal. But in doing so, she had fallen for an advance fee fraud scam, where victims are promised a significant sum of money in exchange for an upfront payment, which they never receive. And because Ella asked her to tick the friends and family payment option, she wasn't covered by PayPal's buyer protection. This meant that although she was able to claw some of the money back, most she never saw again. So in the end, I lost...
Altogether, I lost £20,000. And that's basically the story. And I feel really completely stupid. But now I've lost all this money. What, if anything, do you know about the person or people that scammed you? Absolutely nothing. The police suspect that there is syndicate in Nigeria. It's probably not just one person. It's a whole cottage industry in Nigeria. So who are these online fraudsters who wreak such financial and psychological harm?
Although online scams are a global phenomenon, much of the research looking at the perpetrators focuses on West Africa. Dr Suleiman Lazarus, visiting fellow at LSE's Mannheim Centre for Criminology, analysed the case files of 50 convicted romance scammers in Nigeria. He found that most were young. Nearly 82% were under 26 and 74% were university students.
Most of them, they are either university graduates, university students or university dropouts. They started their criminal career from Horseshoe Kingdom Cybercrime School or Cybercrime Academies, they call it Horseshoe Kingdom HK, where people can enroll and educate themselves in cybercriminal activities. They become experts in cybercriminal activities.
Hustle Kingdom describes the informal schools which train would-be scammers in internet fraud through organised learning, peer support and mentorship. Some graduate to become Yahoo Boys, their name harking back to the early 2000s when young Nigerian scammers used Yahoo email accounts to conduct phishing scams and other fraudulent activities. They are known for being involved in advance fee fraud, phishing and romance scams, often targeting foreign victims like Nikki.
Anyone can be a victim, but from the online offenders,
view and business strategy, those operating from West African countries, they tend to pretend to be white males or females because of the what they call racial stigmatization. When you go to most of the dating platforms, if you create a profile as a black male from West Africa or elsewhere, then your business opportunities are very limited.
From the convicted case file that I analyzed, they tend to also pretend to be military officers because of the additional layer of benefit because the person can be away for some time without any communication. And pretending to be white male or female also opens the door for people all over the world, Australia, UK, Sweden, to become their potential lovers.
One of the key tactics of online fraudsters is known as social engineering, where they study their victims and then use that information to manipulate them emotionally and psychologically to gain their trust and exploit them financially. What the offenders, the cybercriminals, look for is that particular one that where is the weak point for this particular person. If you talk about romance fraud, where relationship, friendship is central,
Then they exploit the personal situation based on their research of their victim, of their client.
To give an example, one offender described a situation where an Australian lady was very difficult to manipulate for a long period of time from his own perspective. But when the cat of this Australian lady died, that was when he was able to get what he wanted because the lady was vulnerable at that point in time. So what they look for is where that vulnerability lies.
It was in this way that Alla Morgan was able to prey on Nicky.
During lockdown, I lost both my parents and my partner of 25 years decided to disappear and take off with our two children. And during that, also the father of one of our children died. So in fact, he killed himself. So that was pretty horrendous. And so that was quite a lot to deal with. And I just got pretty downhearted, actually.
As well as exploiting these vulnerabilities to strike the initial bond, Alan Morgan seemed to share common interests with Nikki. I'm a queer woman of a certain age now. My previous partner, she was amazingly politically active and we used to both be active politically in...
queer politics and green politics. And we used to just talk till the cows came home. And I was really missing it. And was Alan Morgan able to discuss these topics with you, with some credibility? Yes, absolutely. They could talk about anything. I mean, they were basically acting. And they were acting at a very high level. But they knew how to
pull all my strings basically. When it all just came tumbling down, it was just devastating, absolutely devastating. Cyber criminals are now using AI to clone voices, creating nearly perfect imitations of people to trick victims. Nikki wasn't only duped by a fraudster who preyed on her vulnerabilities in the aftermath of a difficult separation and who had clearly studied her background and interests. She had also fallen for a deepfake video of someone claiming to be Alan Morgan.
Andrew Murray is a Professor of Law at LSE and an expert in new media and technology law.
He told me about how scammers are using generative AI to create these convincing deepfakes. Images, sound and video that can pass as real people and real voices. We're all very careless with our voice. We record videos and put them up into social media and all these kinds of things. Or you agree to be on a podcast and the next thing you know your voice is out there in the world for anybody to pick up and to use.
And so we see examples of some really targeted, highly sophisticated fraudulent activity for where, for example, there have this has been mostly, it seems in the past, targeted at the Chinese and Chinese expat community. But there is no doubt it's going to target other parts of the community. Parents get a text message saying their child has been kidnapped and they get a voice message from their child saying,
saying they have been kidnapped and they are in danger and if they don't pay a certain sum of money and usually this is done using time differences where the child is maybe in the US and their phone might be turned off at the side of their bed or they're asleep and they don't pick up their phone. The parents are at home in China and they're given very short windows to
to deal with this. And it sounds like their son or their daughter. That's how accurate it is. You know, what do you do? Do you assume that it is a fake and risk some harm to your child? Or do you pay it?
The deepfake videos that Alla Morgan sent to Nikki of herself were created from videos from a real person's Facebook account. Well Nikki, it's Alla Morgan. I wanted to reach out to reassure you that I am sincere and have no connection to any scams. They'd stolen the identity of a French sailor whose name was Sophie Bavier. The scammer took some videos that were on her Facebook
of her on one of her ships that she was sailing, being the captain, she had oil tankers and tall ships and all these incredible ships that she was sailing around the world. And she makes these little videos and tells people how she's getting on. And the scammer had clearly stolen some of these videos and put a fake voice over onto the videos with my name. Good morning, Nikki. I hope you had a wonderful night. You know the reason I say that?
Like she was having a normal conversation with me. And they were so convincing. I want to prove myself to you and hope this video proves you wrong with all the negative thoughts. You can see it's very stormy weather outside. You're listening to LSE IQ. We want to hear from you, our fantastic listeners, to help us create even better episodes. Could you spare a few minutes to answer a few questions about yourself? We promise it will be quick. Just click the link in the show notes. Now, back to the episode.
Lisa Mills is a senior fraud manager with Victim Support, an independent charity in England and Wales that provides confidential support to victims and witnesses of crime, including those affected by fraud, like Nikki. I asked her what kinds of trends she is seeing.
So I can confidently say within my local area, within the team that I manage, we've seen, particularly with romance fraud, a year-on-year increase. So it can form between a fifth and a quarter of all the referrals that we receive. I cannot overemphasise how common fraud now is and how common online fraud is. Banish all preconceptions that you might have and things that you might read about in the media online.
Personally, our team supports victims from the age of 18 upwards. I think our oldest victim was 101. There is no typical victim of fraud. It's across all genders, across all ages. We support people from across a wide range of backgrounds. People, for example, that have been victims have been police officers, people that have worked for financial institutions.
Lisa told me how the emotional fallout experienced by many victims is exacerbated by the misunderstood nature of online fraud, which can often lead to victim shaming and in turn the under-reporting of crime. The people that we support are certainly not stupid. For a lot of the cases that our team supports, we are looking at people at the highest risk of re-victimisation. So that could be many factors. It could be, yes, you've recently gone through a life-changing event, so you might have suffered bereavement.
You might have experienced a divorce, all manner of things, a really shocking health diagnosis. How often do we hear that expression, "Oh, why did somebody fall for that? I wouldn't have fallen for that." And you never hear that sort of negative terminology around any other crime. You certainly wouldn't say it if somebody experienced a burglary or they were attacked in the street.
And I think that does reinforce why fraud is so widely underreported also, because people feel that they've invited this thing to happen to them, which clearly they haven't. The impacts are wide ranging and they are very impactful. It's not just in the short term, but in the longer term also. And it takes people to very dark places sometimes.
People are not looking for sympathy, so victims clearly want to be validated and heard and listened to about what they've experienced. But unfortunately we do continue to see a great deal of victim shaming and I think that comes into the sort of language that is used when we do talk about online crime and fraud. Other than turning to organisations such as Victim Support, what recourse do victims of online fraud have?
I asked Andrew Murray what kind of legal protections there are for people who fall for these types of scams. When people go online, we get a completely different worldview. So people go online, they start doing all kinds of activity. They might start buying Bitcoin, they might start banking, they might start sort of sponsoring a school overseas or something like that. And
you then go into this virtual environment that crosses borders. So if someone is made the victim of a fraud or scam or something like that, there are two key problems. The first is identifying where the fraud or scam has occurred.
because the person who's carrying out the fraud can be anywhere. The second problem then is enforcement. So if you've been scammed in the United Kingdom, you're looking probably for enforcement through UK law, through the UK police, the UK courts, etc. But they have no jurisdiction in these other places.
So, for example, if the scammer is in Russia, you're highly unlikely to find any cooperation from Russian investigatory or enforcement authorities because the current political situation is, of course, we have isolated Russia. And the cost of tracking them down and the cost of enforcing the law against them is incredibly, incredibly high. And it's incredibly difficult, which means the detection rate and enforcement rate in these online scams is, I'm afraid, very low.
With it being extremely unlikely that scammers are caught, improving online safeguards is essential. The UK's Online Safety Act has just come into force in March 2025. It sets out new digital safety laws designed to regulate online platforms and protect users from harmful content. Andrew tells me how this is intended to work. The Online Safety Act creates specific responsibilities on intermediary platform providers.
These are basically any company that allows two people to be connected over a network, accepting some direct services like phone and direct email and direct messaging. But any social media network, for instance, is covered by it.
And what this does is it creates responsibilities on them to have what are called basically safe platforms. And amongst these, there's an area or a group, I should say, of what are called priorities that they have to fulfill and which they will have to in time report back to the regulator on.
And one of these priorities is the reduction of online fraud. So they are expected to put tools in place to help identify and remove potentially fraudulent content. That could be something as obvious as an advertisement for a fake Bitcoin, or it could be something a little bit less obvious like the fake social media platform.
I asked Andrew what measures online platforms should be putting in place to protect the people that use them.
To be fair to the platforms, I think a lot of this is very hard to identify. Can you tell a particular online account is about an imaginary person, for instance? I think there are things that we can do collectively. So as I said, one problem is around AI generated content. So something like asking the companies that operate AI
AI tools which are accessible to the public to embed into their tool some kind of watermark or piece of metadata that identifies that this is not a genuine image or this is not a genuine sound file or something like that, which would then make it harder for criminals to use these tools to create fake identities or fake profiles or something like that.
The problem is, of course, the criminal underworld will probably supply their own version of these tools, but you can make it harder for people. Then I think, you know, the platforms, the main responsibility really, I think, is when people report things to them that they act expediently, that they don't drag their heels. The problem is that they have obviously vast amounts of data and vast amounts of complaints that
And it costs quite a lot of money to be able to operate kind of these safety systems. Now, what I'm really worried about is it's not specifically around fraud, but around safety. We've got meta Facebook now announcing that they're going to do away with their current system of safety, which has review by human operatives and replace it via a kind of crowdsourced, if you will, system of flagging content.
for automated response. So the companies, rather than investing more, seem to be investing less in these systems. And they're doing so partly through the claim of protecting free speech and free expression. I think we need companies to be required to, and this is where actually the UK Online Safety Act is good,
The companies will be required to show they have safety systems. And if they can't show, they can be fined or they can even be removed from access to the UK market. They can be blocked.
Operating largely free from the fear of repercussions, what motivates online fraudsters to cause such harm? Obviously money is key, but Suleiman Lazarus' research suggests, at least in West Africa, it can be more complex. Some people are very comfortable to make a quick assumption. It's as a result of poverty, it's as a result of deprivation, but not everyone.
Everyone who is poor, living in abject poverty, suffering for years, subscribe to that type of business. So there is something beyond that.
Some highly educated university graduates who create bespoke fake websites and other infrastructure on the request of online scammers frame their actions in terms of colonialism as a way to reclaim the wealth they believe was unjustly taken during colonial rule. Because most of the people were using that colonial justification saying that something like all the gold and diamond they stole from our forefathers, slavery, exploitation, injustice and this
If you ask them, why are you doing what you're doing? Then they will tell you the story. It's not just that they can have a fair employment opportunity, but that is not going to solve the problem for them. For them, the ideology is deep-seated, that the global architecture of a world economy, the West and the rest...
And locally the Yahoo Boys and other similar groups enjoy a venerated status as skilled tricksters, even using their fraudulently acquired wealth to forge links within West African popular culture and music. The successful Yahoo Boys who invest buy music labels. It's a business strategy, you know? Better understood as a relationship of two hands. One hand, the left hand washes the right one and the right one washes the left hand.
then two of them are clean or cleaner. Yahoo Boys, they set up music industries as a part of investing their fund. They set up music industries and those talented singers, people from the street,
who come to the studio and display their talent. And when they hammer, that means when they succeed, the relationship between them and the singers are also tight because they started from there. That gave them the platform. That gave them the microphone in the first instance without that type of setup. So they give them what...
The Nigerian government or the Ghanaian government will never give them. And they will sponsor their gigs around university campuses here and there for them to make it. And once they also make it, then Yahoo Boys also, they are the full force of their client.
They would go to their parties in Dubai, in New York because they could afford it. But most of them would be there, the Yahoo Boys, the Aflame, you know, whenever they want, with champagne and Moet and, you know, that type of lifestyle. So that is the relationship. Based on that, some singers, they praise the Yahoo Boys and they praise their business and they praise...
They dehumanise the victim because they have the same voice, but you cannot describe them as a subculture because they are part and parcel of Nigerian or Ghanaian culture. With little to stop the fraudsters, online scams are unlikely to go away and will become ever more sophisticated, making it feel like it's not if we will be scammed, but when. What can we do to avoid falling for online scams? Here's Lisa from Victim Support.
I think in the first instance, if you feel that it's happening to you, basically you want to keep your information safe. So approach your banks to make sure that your money is safe, that you're not going to be losing any more money, you're not going to have any authorised payments that are coming out.
make sure that you report it to Action Fraud. For those people that aren't aware, Action Fraud is the UK's reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime. We have to think that there are people out there that are determined in committing harm against us every day. So who is the best person to maintain control over your money? The
The answer is you. Who is the best person to keep hold of your personal and financially sensitive information? That's you. So don't let anyone harass you into giving that information over and maintain that sense of connection with others because your existing support network really is your best protection. So if you feel like you're having a little wobble, then reach out to somebody because they are the ones that care about you the most.
Suleiman also recommends reaching out to friends and family, and to be extremely careful about what you share about yourself, since any information can be used to exploit you. Sometimes certain information that we share on social media and we see it as petty, it doesn't really matter, it's just this, it's just that. I'm meeting John there in a...
this bar every Friday or every day. There's some certain type of data that we share and we do not know the implication. One of my main piece of advice would be to be cautious in what we share or to share as less as possible. So sharing as less as possible and if there's any kind of a new engagement with any person, whether from the bank,
It's these close friends and family who are more likely to question some of the more outlandish things that can happen, and which people have sadly fallen for. Here's Andrew Murray.
If somebody says they are a well-known personality and they are contacting you to tell you about this great opportunity, question why. Why does Martin Lewis think that I need to know about this investment scheme? Never do anything under pressure. If somebody's putting you under pressure to do something, question why.
So a lot of the time fraud, especially online fraud, works by putting you under a pressure situation, giving you a deadline or telling you something is urgent or oftentimes representing a person of authority. So we all need to do our bit. If we want the law to work and we want the courts to work and the police to work, we have to kind of minimize their workload a little bit. And that means taking on responsibility. Yeah.
I think the best advice to start with is question everything. There is a danger it could send you crazy. As for Nikki, she's still online, but much the wiser.
I just want everybody to know how easy it is to fall for this nonsense and just be really careful. And I'm getting about 20 friend requests every day. And then 99.9% of them are from scammers and I can spot them a mile off. So I'm pressing the delete button a lot every day.
This episode was produced and written by me, Oliver Johnson, with script development by Sue Winterbank. If you'd like to find out more about the research in this episode, head to the show notes. And if you enjoy iQ, please leave us a review. Join us next month when we ask, is AI destroying the planet?