The Science of Romance Scams

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[00:00:01] Bob: This week on The Perfect Scam.

[00:00:04] Anola Johnson: I was like, I feel uncomfortable with this. I said, "Should I be seeing a red flag here?" And he said, "What do you mean a red flag?" And I said, "I've heard of guys making women fall in love with them, and then stealing all their money." He immediately put a guilt trip on me and said, "I don't need your money.”

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[00:00:29] Bob: Welcome back to The Perfect Scam. I'm your host, Bob Sullivan. There is nothing like Paris to stir your romantic side. Anola Johnson enjoyed one of those postcard perfect trips to France, and came home to a flirtation and a romance she just didn't expect. She was swept off her feet and then swept into a nightmare that stole her heart and her money for nearly two years. But as we'll see, Paris really is part of her story. Criminals are experts at hacking our brains, talking right past our rational selves and directly to the emotional, impulsive part of ourselves. We have a brilliant expert here today to discuss what's sometimes called Amygdala Hijacking. But first, to get us all in the mood, let's go to Europe with Anola.

[00:01:18] Anola Johnson: I got to take my sister along which was really nice. And one kind of funny thing was that she can be a curmudgeon at some times, not really, but it was like dark and I wanted to go out and see the Eiffel Tower, and I said, "Come on, let's go out and see the Eiffel Tower." I had another one of my workmates with me, and she said, "Uh you guys go. I don't want to go." I said, "Are you kidding? You are in the city of lights; you are in Paris. If you don't come with me, you know, you are grounded for the rest of the time here." So anyway, she came and she loved it. She had a great time, but it's just, I don't know what it is about Paris; it's just magical, and I went to Ina Garten's favorite grocery store; I was just blown away. I thought, ooh, we need grocery stores like that in the US. It was amazing. And I came back and I was, I just felt so inspired by everything over there.

[00:02:15] Bob: I would say you're not the first person to get the love bug being in Paris.

[00:02:20] Anola Johnson: Probably not.

[00:02:22] Bob: Anola comes back to her home in Utah but is still enjoying the afterglow of that wonderful trip when she gets a message on LinkedIn from a stranger, a very handsome stranger.

[00:02:33] Anola Johnson: It was simple, it was, it may have even been a automatic one, I want to connect, or something like that, on LinkedIn, and excuse me, I...

[00:02:42] Bob: And he was cute, you're saying, right?

[00:02:44] Anola Johnson: Yeah, well, I'm not immune, you know.

[00:02:46] Bob: What did he look like?

[00:02:47] Anola Johnson: He looked like a businessman. The picture that was presented to me, he was in a shirt and tie and a jacket. He wore glasses, short hair.

[00:02:59] Bob: And he says his name is Pedro.

[00:03:02] Bob: Pedro in a shirt and tie, just says automatically I want to connect, and you say, why not?

[00:03:07] Anola Johnson: Yeah.

[00:03:08] Bob: And then what happens next?

[00:03:09] Anola Johnson: Sometimes people want to chat and sometimes they don't, but this guy wanted to chat. And he said, "I just wanted to reach out and say hello," and it was all very benign. It was, "I hope it's okay if I talk to you." And I said, "Sure, that's fine." And I think it went right from there to, "Are you married?" And I just assumed that he was maybe looking for a companionship and wanted to make sure that I was available versus not available, I assumed. And so I had, I did tell him that I was single, and then he says, "Is it okay if we're friends?" "Sure, yeah, that's fine."

[00:03:51] Bob: Pedro's LinkedIn profile indicates he works in the oil and gas industry.

[00:03:57] Anola Johnson: He was some sort of supervisor/engineer type person, and from what he told me from there was that he just did jobs off and on where he would take jobs for a certain amount of time with a certain oil company, finish the job, and go back to San Diego where he lived with his one child.

[00:04:21] Bob: His personal life has lots of layers.

[00:04:24] Anola Johnson: So the introduction went, both my parents were killed in a car crash when I was 14. He originally was from Spain, he said, and so he was raised by his Aunt Judy, and he moved over to the States about 20 years prior, and he lived in San Diego.

[00:04:45] Bob: And he was a widow, right?

[00:04:46] Anola Johnson: Yes. His wife had died of cancer about five years prior.

[00:04:50] Bob: He sounds kind, but also, he's a dad, so this seems like a fairly attractive fellow, right?

[00:04:55] Anola Johnson: Yeah.

[00:04:57] Bob: It's Anola who says to Pedro, let's move off LinkedIn and into cellphone texting. And then...

[00:05:04] Anola Johnson: Once we did that things escalated pretty quickly, and within a couple of weeks, he was telling me that he loved me.

[00:05:14] Bob: Did you tell him that you loved him?

[00:05:16] Anola Johnson: I felt, I was a little confused by that, by why he said that. I, but I do have to say that I was infatuated with him. I thought he seemed interesting. And so I did what I thought he wanted me to do and said it back to him, but I didn't really feel it, but I felt like maybe in the future I might.

[00:05:39] Bob: Yeah, sure.

[00:05:40] Anola Johnson: So I, I did say it, and he was all happy about that.

[00:05:46] Bob: Feeling infatuated but also a little confused, Anola asks for a video phone call, and they do have one, sort of.  

[00:05:56] Anola Johnson: And it was really weird because he said that his iPhone Facetime wasn't working, which I've never known one not to work, but whatever, so we got on Skype, and he called me from there and I could see his face for just a few seconds, and then it went off. He like hung up or something. And then he would call back and then I could only see my face. And he said, "I can't get it to work where both our faces are on at the same time." So he hung up again, went back to him, and this went on for a few times, and I just thought, that is really strange, but I did see him, I felt, at the time, that it was him...

[00:06:45] Bob: And at about that time, Pedro starts talking about finances with Anola in a way you might talk money with a future life partner.

[00:06:54] Anola Johnson: There was a discussion about how much money he made, how much money I made. And do I have retirement accounts; do I own a home or do I rent? He told me he made four to five hundred thousand dollars a year, which sounded like a heck of a lot of money to me. And then he wanted to know how much I made, so I told him. And even though I didn't feel comfortable about it, I just thought maybe this is just a cultural difference. Maybe people in Spain talk like that. I don't know. But so when I told him I had a couple of retirement accounts, and he said, "We should start a joint account together. And my friend told me about this great crypto place that we can both put money into and this will feed our future dreams of travel and of buying this house," that he said that he wanted.

[00:07:51] Bob: Invest together? In crypto? Anola has a very strong, very negative reaction to that.

[00:07:58] Anola Johnson: At first, I was like, I feel uncomfortable with this. I said, "Should I be seeing a red flag here?" And he said, "What do you mean a red flag?" And I said, "I've heard of guys making women fall in love with them, and then stealing all their money." He immediately put a guilt trip on me and said, "I don't need your money. Why would I need your money? I make plenty of money. And I just thought this would be of good benefit for both of us. But if you don't want to do this and, and build our future, then what are we even doing?" And I thought, okay. I said, "But can we just put this on the back burner for a while. Let's wait until we meet." And so we got into a little bit of an argument that way but we just kind of left that alone.

[00:08:51] Bob: So Pedro drops the subject and they keep talking and make several tentative plans to meet. Finally, about five weeks into their relationship she makes plans to go to San Diego. But before they can pull that off...

[00:09:05] Anola Johnson: A few days prior to when we were going to meet up, he texted me and said that he had gotten a job over at the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. And he had to leave immediately. And those hopes were dashed, but he was only going to be gone supposedly a month to six weeks, and then he would be back, and then we could meet. So I accepted that.

[00:09:29] Bob: So that was a big disappointment, right?

[00:09:30] Anola Johnson: Oh yeah, yeah, it was.

[00:09:34] Bob: So Pedro goes to Abu Dhabi, and after a couple of weeks, he brings up investing again, this time Anola has a different reaction.

[00:09:44] Anola Johnson: And I thought I've got this one account that's not really doing great bringing, earning me a lot of money. Okay, I'll cash that out. It was like $100,000, and I gave him 50,000. I put that in this account that I created from the website that he sent to me. And he showed me that he put in the same amount; so we were doing this together, right? So that went into the account. Then I think the next week he came to me again and said, "Hey, my friend told me about this other account that's even better than the first one." He said, "Let's put that other 50,000 in this other account." And I said, okay. So I did and I put my other 50,000. He said, "I'm going to put 70,000 in this one." I was in charge of the password to make me feel like I was in control. I would look at them. They would make a couple of thousand dollars a day, which I thought, wow, that's wild. But I had heard of people making a lot of money in cryptos, and I know so little about it, but I thought well maybe this is the way it is. I, I had no idea.

[00:11:02] Bob: Soon after, Pedro asks Anola for an unusual favor.

[00:11:07] Anola Johnson: He texted me one day and say, "Hey, my internet's really slow over here. Could you help me move some money from my account into my supplier's account?" And I said, "Sure," being a little curious to see what was in his bank account. So he gives me the link and his password, and once I'm in, they have to send a code to his phone. He gives me the code. I enter it, and then I'm in his bank account. And when I look in there, there's over $4 million, and...

[00:11:40] Bob: Wow.

[00:11:41] Anola Johnson: He wanted me to move $1.4 million into his supplier's account for supplies. And so I did that. He walked me through how to do it, and after we got done, that was it. Everything was cool. He came to me a few days later and he said, "Hey, I need to make another payment to somebody else. Can you help me again?" So this time it was for $108,000. And I wired it to whoever else he wanted me to wire it to, and that was done. It was fine. No problem.

[00:12:21] Bob: So now she's acting a little bit like a home office banker for Pedro. And also, she's feeling more comfortable sharing financial risks with him, but when it comes time to make a third transaction, something goes wrong.

[00:12:36] Anola Johnson: And the third one, he said he had really slow internet, and he wasn't able to get me the code soon enough, so we kept timing out. The third time it happened, we got locked out of the account. And I just, I was sick. I thought I had done something wrong. It said his account was frozen now. So he calls the bank he says, and they tell him that he has to come in person to unfreeze the account. Which of course he can't do because he's out in the ocean somewhere. Because he knows that I know that he has a lot of money in that account still, he still had up close to $3 million in there, he said, "Hey, can you loan me $100,000 until we get back, and I promise I will pay you back, I'll pay you back with interest." And so I said, "Okay," knowing that he had plenty of money to pay me back, and that he would be back soon, I agreed.

[00:13:58] Bob: Anola will front the money for this transaction. Sure she knows he has millions of dollars in an account, so it seems an easy request except she doesn't have $100,000 sitting around. So she has to access her home equity line of credit. She gets the money and sends it to him via cryptocurrency, and that transaction seems to go smoothly which is good because suddenly there are more crises.

[00:14:00] Anola Johnson: After that, there were constant delays, constant new reasons that he needed more money, and so I got to the point where I had maxed out my HELOC. They say that you can borrow up to 80% of the value of your home. So I had, by that time, sent him about $350,000.

[00:14:25] Bob: And that represented most of your house's value.

[00:14:27] Anola Johnson: Yeah.

[00:14:29] Bob: And this six-week assignment turns into a six-month assignment. There are continual delays, additional requests for money, and then disaster strikes.

[00:14:42] Anola Johnson: There was an explosion on the rig and two people died. They took him into custody because he was the supervisor. And so I didn't hear from him for days, but at that time I remember thinking, I was at a Christmas brunch with my friends, and it was embarrassing for me to tell them what he was saying because it didn't sound plausible really to me. But I'm at the point now where I'm so invested in this relationship, emotionally and financially, that I feel like I have to keep going forward. And so I told them about it. I could see a couple of eyebrows raise with my friends, and others just being concerned, and but I was really questioning that. And I didn't care that I didn't hear from him for a few days, 'cause I just had to try and sort all this out myself. And I also googled "explosion at the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company rig," didn't see anything there, and I thought that would certainly be news, but I didn't see anything.

[00:15:53] Bob: Already down to her last few dollars and with a risking skepticism about the relationship, Anola's life is about to take another dramatic twist. Pedro finally gets back in touch and says he's deeply regretting that he'll be away from his son on Christmas so he asks Anola to send a top-of-the-line iPad to his son as a present. He's now in Houston. So she buys the gadget, ships it off, and then everything changes.

[00:16:21] Anola Johnson: Maybe a week or so later, I get this phone call, and it's from a man whose voice I didn't recognize. It sounded pretty commanding and just, "Is this Anola Johnson?" And I said, "Yes." And I just froze. And he said, "You sent a package down to this address," and he said, "I just wanted to know, did you mean for that package to go to Nigeria?" And I said, "No, this was supposed to be going to my boyfriend's son in Houston." And he told me that they had just raided this apartment and there were probably, he said, about 90 boxes, and they were all filled with electronics that was being repackaged and sent over to Nigeria. And I just about blew a gasket. I couldn't understand what was going on, what was he telling me? Why was this happening?

[00:17:33] Bob: Why was this happening? Anola's whole world is crashing around her. She now knows her money has been stolen and the love affair that began 9 months earlier, right as she had gotten home from France, well it was all a lie. The pictures Pedro had sent just lifted off the internet; the son, the oil rig, none of it was true.

[00:17:55] Bob: So just to take a breath here, obviously you discover all this money's been stolen, but also you still thought you had found love, right, and now you're alone and you've had all this money stolen. Try to explain to someone how that feels.

[00:18:08] Anola Johnson: I, I think I got over the love part fairly quickly because I just got so pissed off, and I was really upset more about the money than I was about the relationship...

[00:18:22] Bob: That makes sense.

[00:18:23] Anola Johnson: ...because he just ruined me. At this point, I'm 67. There's no start over button. I was thinking that I could retire soon.

[00:18:34] Bob: Instead, she suddenly has a very long road in front of her.

[00:18:40] Anola Johnson: One of the things that the federal agent told me is that the biggest thing that I have to do right now is tell my family. And boy, I will tell you, that was the hardest thing I think I've ever done, but my oldest brother, he's my rock. I told him the gist of what had gone on. And he didn't want the details, he just said, "How much do you think you gave him?" And at that point I thought I had calculated about $700,000. And he about fell out of his chair. And then he said, "You've got to tell your boys." And I've got two grown sons, which I had taken money from to feed to this guy as well, thinking that oh, I'll be able to pay them back before...

[00:19:44] Bob: You borrowed money from them?

[00:19:45] Anola Johnson: Yep.

[00:19:46] Bob: Wow.

[00:19:47] Anola Johnson: Yep.

[00:19:48] Bob: So you had to tell them.

[00:19:49] Anola Johnson: So I had to tell them that money was gone. And that is not a good feeling. I was probably about as low as you can go. I never thought about suicide. But I understood how people could get there. And it's not a good feeling. Not even a little bit.

[00:20:13] Bob: I'm so sorry.

[00:20:15] Anola Johnson: But...

[00:20:17] Bob: And from this dark place, Anola decides there is someone else she should tell about the crime, because she figures there is a real person behind the picture Pedro sent, and he deserves to know what's going on.

[00:20:30] Anola Johnson: So yeah, and basically, I was in so much pain at that point that I just thought, the least I can do is reach out to this guy and let him know. I thought the real guy need to know that his, how his face is being used online. I didn't know if he knew or not. So then I had two choices. I found two Facebook pages; one of a guy in Israel who was married, had six kids, and who, I think, was in real estate investment, and he had had years of posts. But he hadn't posted for a couple of years. And then I saw another Facebook page where it showed his status as separated and living in LA. And I thought, so he must have split up with his wife and moved to LA, I guess. And that's why he hadn't posted for the last couple of years. And so I reached out on Messenger, and a few days later he got back to me and wanted immediately to do a video call...

[00:21:51] Bob: A video call? Anola agrees and they hit it off right away.

[00:21:56] Anola Johnson: And I get on the phone and there he is. It's him this time. And we talked for about 20 minutes. And it was him the whole time. And so I thought, okay, this is the guy this time. And he didn't use an alias, he used his name, Naph.

[00:22:15] Bob: Soon she and Naph are talking just about every day.

[00:22:19] Anola Johnson: I guess now that I was introduced to a possible relationship, I wanted that, I really wanted that.

[00:22:30] Bob: With her brother's help, Anola had managed to get a new credit card that she could use while straightening out the rest of her financial life. Meanwhile, her new boyfriend just traveling back and forth to Australia for work. They make plans to meet in LA, but they keep getting delayed, then he has a crisis at his bank and asks if he can borrow money from Anola. She agrees and takes out a cash advance and sends more than $10,000 to him. And then there's more canceled trips, more crises, more request for cash. It all continues for another 9 months, and still they haven't met.

[00:23:05] Bob: So at one point you say, okay, enough's enough. I'm flying to LA. When does that happen?

[00:23:09] Anola Johnson: Yeah, that was like, I think the latter part of September of that year. So he had come back. I said you had better be at the airport to pick me up, 'cause he kept giving me excuses even though he was supposedly back in LA. And so I went down there; he didn't show up. And so I flew home and I was just beside myself. Why won't you meet me? What's going on? And he says, "I've been trying to tell you for some time, but I just, I couldn't." And he says, "But I'm going to call you."

[00:23:51] Bob: I've been trying to tell you, but I just couldn't? What a strange thing to say, but he calls with a confession.

[00:24:00] Anola Johnson: It was a video call. I see this young black man in Africa and my mind was just blown. He said, "My name is Ben," and he says, "And I've been trying to tell you, but I didn't know how."

[00:24:20] Bob: Naph, the Israeli living in Los Angeles is really Ben in Africa. He confesses that he's been lying to her all along, but now he wants to come clean.

[00:24:34] Anola Johnson: He said, "During this, all this time I've actually fallen in love with you, and I want you to come over here and we're going to get married. I'm going to build us a house over here." I'm just thinking, oh my God. Yeah, no. But again, I had to pull my head out of the clouds a second time.

[00:24:57] Bob: Anola doesn't buy it. She's persuaded that this is just another cover story for another scam, but...

[00:25:04] Bob: How long does it take for you to cut off contact with him?

[00:25:08] Anola Johnson: Actually, longer than you might assume. My first thoughts were, okay, maybe you can learn more about what's going on here if you keep in contact with him for a while, but the relationship changed, of course. It was no longer, weirdly, he thought it might be that he would still be calling me sweetheart and all this kind of stuff. And I'm just going, I'm sure I'm older than your mother, which come to find out, I was. (laughs) But I don't know, there was just this weird relationship, and I said, "Why did you do this to me?" And he said, "I didn't want to, but my girlfriend was pregnant, she was having a, the baby, and I needed this money to have the baby." And then he also sent me a song, some rap song about how hard life is in Nigeria. And from the pictures he sent me and everything, our conversations, I get that part. I know that things are hard over there. So I soften, again, but I'm bound and determined that this is not going to last. But he would ask me every once in a while, for like medicine for his child. His child was, I think, a year or so old at that point in time, and he would need to take him to the doctor. He would ask me for one or two hundred dollars, and I would send that to him knowing who he was just because I felt obligated to help, but I said, "I can't do this." I said, "I am at the end of my rope. I don't have any money to give you."

[00:27:02] Bob: Have you added up the amount of money that was stolen?

[00:27:05] Anola Johnson: Added up altogether, which was about $850,000.

[00:27:09] Bob: Wow.

[00:27:09] Anola Johnson: And I don't even know how I had access to that much money. Most of it borrowed, but that's what the black and white said. I can't explain how I was able to get my hands on that much money.

[00:27:22] Bob: I think someone who's listening, naturally you've already raised this question yourself, will ask the question, what was it about your state of mind that not only had this happen, but it went on for as long as it did? What would you say to a question like that, and what I'm trying to get at is lots of people are in this same place, lots of people are victims to this very same crime. Help people understand what that comes from.

[00:27:45] Anola Johnson: It's a lot of grooming. It's a lot and lot of grooming before you reach that point of no return. And one of the things that they employ is, that's why they like to text so much because you have access to each other, like 24/7, and the relationship can grow exponentially fast from that. You can tell this person that you're close with, that you've never seen, all your deepest, darkest secrets, all your desires, and they can do the same. It's a way to build trust even though trust is not earned.

[00:28:26] Bob: It had been a long time since you'd been in a relationship, right?

[00:28:28] Anola Johnson: Yeah, a long time, like 25 years or so.

[00:28:32] Bob: You felt seen finally by this person.

[00:28:36] Anola Johnson: Yeah, it's just they don't only tell you they love you; they build this life with you. That we're going to live here, we're going to travel, we're going to have all that we need to have. And once you get that in your mind, once you see that, you don't want to let that go. And that feels really good because you haven't had that in such a long time. You haven't had anybody; I hadn't had anybody pay attention to me for eons. And so yeah, feeling seen was spectacular. (chuckles)

[00:29:13] Bob: How are you now?

[00:29:14] Anola Johnson: I'm deeply in debt. I'm trying to hang on by my fingernails. I thought maybe doing a podcast or YouTube might help me get viewers and then maybe I could earn some money back that way. That's a long road, but what's my choice? I don't know what the future holds for me. I will be done paying off my mortgage when I'm 97. Who's going to employ me that long? Do I want to work that long? No, and no. I don't know what to do. But all I can do at this moment in time is try and help others not fall into the same traps that I did.

[00:29:53] Bob: But I understand that you are scam-free now.

[00:29:56] Anola Johnson: Abso-frickin'-lutely. (chuckles) Yeah, no more of that BS.

[00:30:04] Bob: The months and months of intimate conversations, the empty bank accounts, Anola will live with the consequences of what happened to her for a long time. But she feels firmly on the road to recovery, and really wants others to hear about what happened to her. One important part of her story is that it wasn't a single moment in time, or even a single scam, the criminals groomed her. They changed their stories to adjust to her, even to the point of letting her in on the secret, in a way. “I was stealing from you, but now I really love you.” The rest of today's episode is devoted to better understanding the psychology of why this happens to so many people, why the criminals well-rehearsed strategies are so effective.

[00:30:47] Anola Johnson: I just want to say that that loneliness is an epidemic in this country. I didn't think I was lonely, but because I was single, or because I was missing maybe something, it made me more prone to want something like that if it's presented to me. But I would say you need to resist that kind of urge because you don't know who's on the other line. You don't know, and really, Prince Charming is not going to come and rescue you. If we think critically about it, no to-do, successful, person is going to randomly choose you to be in their life. Nobody's going to do that. But it made sense then; it makes no sense now. But there's so many ways for fraudsters to engage via text, via Facebook, whatever platform you're on, and I would just say you can't engage, or you have to say, this is a scammer until they prove otherwise. But you, we're in a different world, and you just can't trust like we used to.

[00:32:07] Bob: We are in a different world, yes, but it's a world we need to understand. We all have questions about how someone we know might become a victim of an ongoing long-term crime like this, how a person's heart and mind can be well hijacked. And here to help us understand that much better is Austin Cusak. He's Assistant Professor of Leadership Development at the FDIC. He's an expert in behavioral science.

[00:32:35] Austin Cusak: A lot of us don't realize that our brain right now is in the exact same configuration as its been for the last 35,000 years. And so our brain is very worried about snakes in tall grass, about sabretooth cats. It's very worried about attacks from other tribes. So the brain is going to do whatever it can to be a good member of its tribe. So we are very tribal in that category. So the current configuration of our brain is not wired for social media, it is not wired for fraud from the inside. So that's the first thing that happens to Anola is criminal is convincing her that they are part of her group, part of her tribe, a safe person first.

[00:33:29] Bob: Once on the inside, once a criminal gets a victim to feel like a member of the same team, the same tribe, then the criminal can get to work turning off the victim's rational side.

[00:33:41] Austin Cusak: The easiest way to kind of explain why this is happening is, so Daniel Kahneman got a Nobel Prize for his work on why the brain does what it does, over 20 years of research, and he boils it down to these two types of thinking. And so I'm going share this as just like a simplistic way for us to understand a lot of these complex things. You are either doing fast thinking, or you are doing slow thinking. Neither is bad, it's just that your brain is going to receive input and when it's receiving input, it's going to say, okay, am I in danger? And if you are in danger, or perceive some type of danger, it goes right to the amygdala and it says, fast thinking, I'm going to use the emotional reactions that I know. I'm going to poke through really quick this limbic region which stores our memories. Do I associate this with something bad? Yes. I run or I fight. And then there's the slow thinking which is what we want to have engaged which is, there's no immediate threat. I can now take my time, go out to the prefrontal cortex, think about associations, what kind of long-term planning do I associate with this? What kind of risk assessment might there be with this? So the brain's going to go one or two ways. And so the criminal's goal is to prevent Anola at every stage from having this slow, rational logical thinking.

[00:35:15] Bob: So criminals want to talk past the thinking part of your brain and talk right to the instinctual part.

[00:35:22] Austin Cusak: Okay, so amygdala hacking by the way that Goldman described it, is this immediately overwhelming emotional response that our brain is perceiving as a threat that is going to trigger the fight or flight and bypass our brain's logic mechanisms. So it is, in fact, fast thinking. It's Kahneman's fast thinking. That is the hijack. I personally in my experiences, I expand the amygdala hijack to not just that overwhelming emotional response, but also the hijack of the slow, insidious relationship-building, trust-building, love-bombing. It is any actions that the criminal is taking to force the victim into fast, emotional thinking all the time. It is, that is the hijack. The hijack is I only want information being received through my eyes, my ears, my skin. All that information straight to the amygdala, emotional responses. That's the hijack. That's why we can't see the red flags, that's why we ignore things. That's why the brain says, something's fishy, but it would be too painful for me to actually explore that road. Too painful. I'm going to avoid the pain; my emotions feel this. And part of the amygdala hijack is creating lots of cognitive dissonance, which for a criminal is a very good thing. The criminal wants to create cognitive dissonance where there are these two competing thoughts in the victim's brain because then they can provide the answer. They can have the emotions tied to that. That's the hijack.

[00:37:19] Bob: And when our brains are hijacked, criminals can really get down to the business of grooming and financial manipulation. It is so hard after the fact to talk about some of these stories, to compress 18-months of manipulation into a few minutes of a podcast. Even the language we're using is rational, and we're talking about irrational things. It's really important to understand that all of us, under the right circumstances, say and do things based on purely emotional or instinctual responses.

[00:37:51] Austin Cusak: I tried to talk with even some of my neighbors about this and her story, and I was very disappointed in their responses to it. Well she should have known better. So it really does, like we, we tend to very quickly move into that victim attribution or the attribution bias, like we should all know better. Now that scam and how that went down, it was kind the same playbook that they used, is that they saw the opportunity, it wasn't an immediate, I'm going to ask for money, it was a slow, them impersonating someone. They did the same thing. But she was very--, she was wary, she didn't send them money, but the tactics didn't change that they, the brain still needs that stability. The brain still hopes that it's going to happen someday. So when I heard the second story, like on first blush you hear that it happened to her a second time, and the first thing that we think of is, she should have known better. It's that attribution bias. But then when you hear her explanation of it, and how that started to go down, and how they did it, you're like, wow these, these people and whoever is creating these textbooks that they're following, they're very good. Like they are very good at what they're doing, and think of it kind of like a car salesman, and I don't mean to demean car salesmen, but there was, there was a time where I had a friend that was going to get a car, and they were like, ah, I'm going to win this negotiation. I'm going to talk them down, and in my head, I was like, wait a second. So you're not a negotiator, you don't have experience doing negotiations, and you're going to go up against someone that does this all day, every day, and you think that you're going to like conquer them? This is you against them. This is their job. This is the full-time thing that they do day in and day out every year making small tweaks, making minor things. That's what these criminals do. They are masters at manipulating, they are honing their craft, they are making little tweaks here and there, so when she is reaching out, right, so this is, the brain needs closure. So that's part of it is that she has this terrible thing happen to her, and our brains are wired to seek closure.

[00:40:13] Bob: While it might be hard to understand why Anola suffered a second romance scam, in some ways the first time set her up for the second. Remember she reached out in an attempt to warn a person she thought was a victim too. The man's image was being used as a lure by criminals.

[00:40:29] Austin Cusak: That second criminal is looking at this as, she's already in this very heightened emotional state. It is very easy for me to now trigger her fast thinking once again by pretending to be the person that she really hopes me to be, because she's trying to do the right thing and I can take advantage of that.

[00:40:53] Bob: So in some ways, the fact that she was already a victim made her more likely to be a victim again?

[00:41:00] Austin Cusak: I don't know if that's every case. I'm sure that there is probably some research that has been done on that. I would say from my understanding of just behavioral science in general, yes, absolutely. Especially if she's been in that state of fast thinking for a very long time, she does not yet have closure, she has not yet processed everything that has happened for her. The brain is going to reach and stretch, and want to have, 'cause she would still be in the state of cognitive dissonance, I'm assuming, in that moment; where I've got these two competing ideas, I need an answer. And that gives the criminal a very good opportunity to start to control that narrative, provide those answers, lead that person where they want it to be.

[00:41:51] Bob: And there is another powerful tool criminals use, they're very good at appearing to have very intimate conversations.

[00:41:59] Austin Cusak: We're looking at criminals that are very masterful at using cognitive empathy. They're not feeling these emotions, but there is a thing called the dark impact where you can use empathy to very much manipulate other people. I would say that a lot of the tactics of dark empathy is exactly what the cult leaders are using to manipulate, to keep manipulation, and they get very good at it.

[00:42:25] Bob: Dark empathy is a new term to me.

[00:42:27] Austin Cusak: The dark empathy?

[00:42:28] Bob: Yeah.

[00:42:29] Austin Cusak: There, there's quite a bit of research on it that you can kind of dig in in the leadership realm, and this is why I mentioned this because it's going back to leadership development. When we are trying to develop leaders, sometimes, and this does not happen very often, but sometimes we do come across someone who is a textbook narcissist. And I don't mean that in kind of the, ah, they're narcissistic. I mean that they would top off if they took an assessment for narcissism. They are drawn to tactics of leadership, because at its core, a tactic of leadership is to positively influence others towards a common goal. I can remove that positively and just influence others towards a common goal. And so the people that want to manipulate, the people who want power, find that by studying leadership, by studying how to use cognitive empathy, by studying active listening, they study those same tactics which they can then use to move upward. They can then use to shift others' behaviors. And that's essentially what she ran up against.

[00:43:35] Bob: Meanwhile, the victims are in the throes of a crime and what feels like a very real romance. The end is an incredibly painful moment, so is telling people about what happened. Criminals use that to their advantage too.

[00:43:50] Austin Cusak: And so just like with a lot of people not reporting these things, or not talking about these things, is because we fear that we will experience more pain of rejection, pain of betrayal if we openly talked about these types of things with people. So we avoid that pain, and that is a normal thing, it's just kind of a crappy thing, especially in regards to this. The criminals know this. They know that we are going to avoid those feelings of embarrassment because our, again, 35,000-year-old brain says, if I show myself to be a weak link, if I show myself to be someone who can't be trusted by this group, I might get kicked out of the tribe, then I'm dead. So this is a survival tactic that the brain is going to constantly push is I must hide these things because this could lead to a problem with the tribe, but also, I'm going to avoid this because I know that this will experience, like I will feel pain if I go down this road. And so as we start to kind of approach that pathway, like that physical pathway, the brain's like, nope, nope, I'll do it another day.

[00:45:07] Bob: I don't think we talk enough about the avoid, pain avoidance element to this, because it is very painful that moment when you realize, my money's gone forever. That's a very painful recognition.

[00:45:17] Austin Cusak: I think the threat of betrayal of the whole thing not being real. As a personal thing, I actually had a conversation with someone very close to me who was in a religion, and some stuff came out about the religion that kind of debunked some of the founding tenets of the religion, and they stayed in it. And I was asking them, why? Why stay in it? And it was understandable and it was very hard for me to listen to them because they're much older, and they said, my entire life I believed this. My entire life. It's part of my identity, it's my community. If you took this away from me, it would break me.

[00:46:03] Bob: Austin really wanted to drive home a point about these powerful tactics that criminals use. Some of them are used in traditional persuasion. He already mentioned sales tactics, but you might find some of these ideas in leadership training or management training which is part of Austin's job at FDIC.

[00:46:21] Austin Cusak: I may be a very unpopular person for saying this, Bob, but a lot of the leadership tactics that we use is exactly what the criminals use. They use the same tactics but they use it for nefarious purposes. But influencing people, the tactics, the way the brain works, it's the same. And so in, in some cases it is us saying, these are the things that we're going to practice so that you can positively influence. And at the same time it is you need to be aware that these people are doing these things to you so that you can actually counter them, so that you can stop them, so that you can be on the lookout for. So in that world of leadership development, there is a surprising amount of crossover in terms of both helping people and manipulating and avoiding manipulation.

[00:47:14] Bob: So there are light and dark ways to use behavioral science, right?

[00:47:18] Austin Cusak: Cialdini has his book "Influence" and his book "Pre-Suasion," and I'm going to throw out the disclaimer that things that I say are not representative of my agency. These are my own opinions, but I do want to point out that Cialdini has done a lot of great research on this subject, specifically on influence. And he even calls it out in his books about like the tactic is the same. You can use this. It is the knife that you can use to carve something beautiful or stab someone in the back, but the brain's going to receive it the same way.

[00:47:53] Bob: It did strike me talking with Anola that the criminals did more than just appeal to her emotions, however. Remember, they showed her an account that allegedly had $4 million in it, so they were working to counter any skepticism she might have had.

[00:48:08] Bob: So it seems to me like they, they know how to play in the rational brain space as well.

[00:48:14] Austin Cusak: Yes, so, so that is, that is part of the ethos, pathos, and logos that has been used on us since Aristotle perfected by Plato, so we're talking what 300 and like 48 BC that we had these three compelling means of persuasion. 3--, 347BC where it is essentially what is going to be the most compelling for you? Am I going to make an appeal to character, lead with an appeal to emotion and then follow it with just enough logic to make it plausible. Those three things, ethos, pathos, and logos, is the core of marketing, like all marketing is based on that. You see a car commercial and it is a basketball player who's famous driving the car. That's an appeal to character. So the use of logic, the use of data to reinforce is very compelling. But that is the answer to the cognitive bias. If it's plausible enough, if it's data and it's plausible enough, or if they say, look, I have these bank accounts, why would I need your money? It's plausible enough to answer and remove the cognitive bias. And that is the insidiousness of this entire thing is that I put like, I, the criminal, am putting my victim into fast thinking. They're making emotional decisions. The second that they start to have this, and I can feel them starting to pull away, I reinforce it with lots of love, lots of dopamine. When they start to question it, I give just enough data, just enough of a logical response to, to basically shift away from these two competing ideas so they can only hold onto this one idea. I use time pressure, I use empathy, I, right, like I reinforce these things. And then, this is the thing that is really just err, is that they just inspire the shared vision, and then they reinforce it with this is our future together. This is the compelling image. This is the dream of what's possible with us if this happens. This is the long-term interest. You are the only one that can do this. And they paint this big, shared aspiration.

[00:50:39] Bob: Feeling like you're on the same team with that shared vision is also a behavioral trick that well-trained criminals employ.

[00:50:47] Austin Cusak: And so when you're in alignment with each other, the principle of this is a psychological principle called homophily. And homophily is this idea that we really gravitate towards people who like the same things we like, who we perceive are part of the same group. So a great example of this, I play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was 8 during the Satanic panic, where we had to hide it from my mom when me and my two older brothers did this. So if I meet somebody and they also play D&D, I instantly like them. They could be a terrible human being, but I'm now giving them the benefit of the doubt because they love a thing that I love, so therefore, they can't be that bad. And that is that concept of homophily. So Pedro did that very well. And also, what the scammers did, and like she said, I am suspicious, right. So the cognitive processes are happening, he didn't back out at that moment, he kept going. Even multiple times when in that relationship when she called him out on things, he weathered those storms. He talked her down. He convinced her otherwise. He got outraged. He threatened to walk. And that is really hard for a couple of reasons. One is because we crave that dopamine, we crave that oxytocin, and the threat of that being yanked away very suddenly, that's going to hurt. And the brain is going to avoid pain. And this is one of the things that we don't necessarily recognize, is that our brain is going to process physical and mental pain the same way in the exact same area. And it wants to avoid it. So that mental pain must be avoided. The brain says, can't have this, don't want this.

[00:52:45] Bob: Okay, so under all this knowledge of how our brains work, and sometimes work against our own interests, what can we do to better protect ourselves from an amygdala hijack? For starters, we could teach ourselves to be more understanding of victims. Austin has a lot of very practical advice for helping someone who you're worried is under the influence of a criminal.

[00:53:08] Austin Cusak: When we suspect someone is ignoring these types of red flags, when they are stuck in that amygdala hijack, they are not in control of this. They have someone who is manipulating them and the self-acceptance that they are being manipulated is going to hurt. It is going to cause a lot of pain. So the first thing that we want to do with that person is to use our own cognitive empathy, because if we've not been through something similar, it can be very challenging to allow our emotions or even our compassion in. So cognitive empathy is, I'm going to listen, I'm going to get very curious, I'm going to try to ask questions, I'm not going to give judgment, and then this is probably the first thing that I would say. Approaching this as, I know someone that I suspect is being uh, is, is being manipulated by criminals. So this is that that's the lens I'm looking at right now. That person needs to say, okay, before I give you any advice, I will always ask if now is a good time for me to share some advice or give you a thought. I always want to give that person the locus of control. It's not that they're not going to receive that information, it's is now a good time? It's, hey, I have a real concern that I need to talk to you about. Is now a good time for me to share that? That's the first thing is you don't let that person off the hook, you don't say, oh, I've got some, I really want to share this. Is it okay for me to share it? Is now a good time for me to share it? Let them choose the time. We want them to have that control, 'cause oftentimes they know, they're feeling that, and there's that initial fear, the cortisol is spiking. The adrenaline starts to flow because the brain now feels, I'm in trouble, I'm in danger. So when we say, is now a good time for me to share some thoughts or give you some advice... if they say no, that is amazing. Okay when can I do this then? Let them choose a time or they'll say I'll come back to you. They always come back. I use this tactic frequently. Sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's two days, the person almost always comes back to me and says, I am now ready to talk about this thing. But you don't want to try and force the flag on them when they are in that state of emotion.

[00:55:42] Bob: Getting back out of the highly emotional state, out of the amygdala hijacking often requires something Austin calls calming the amygdala, talking with empathy can help others, but you can do that for yourself too.

[00:55:56] Austin Cusak: If you do physical movement, you can also have a mental shift with that movement, hence the beauty of going and getting coffee. I can't tell you, Bob, I do a lot of coffee at work, and the code for, hey, can we get coffee, it's not really a, I need coffee, or I want to spend time with you, the code is, I really need to get a sanity check from somebody, and I don't really want to ask, 'cause that's embarrassing. But in the act of walking to the coffee and walking back, that allows the person to share the thing and calm the amygdala. The other thing is breathing. So there's been a lot of research that's done on the, the 4x4, the breathe in for 4, hold for 4, release for 4, hold for 4. And then there's also a lot of research that's been done on what's called the 478, which is where you breathe in for 4 seconds, you hold for 7 seconds, and then you do this exhale for 8 seconds. Now the reason why these work so well is because when you are breathing in a normal way, you are cueing and telling the amygdala, I am safe. I am not in danger. So even if that cortisol is starting to spike and the adrenaline is starting to spike and your body is going into fight or flight, you can calm it. Some people are like, ah, I don't want to breathe. So just go for a walk. Just, just walk and then talk and then say, hey, I want to share this with you. But that's it, is that those are the very first steps that always work because we have to get that amygdala calmed down before we can share something with them.

[00:57:45] Bob: Amygdala calming doesn't have to begin with a conversation though.

[00:57:49] Austin Cusak: When someone is suspicious that they might be stuck in one of these things, there's a lot of advice online, it's oh, walk away or do this thing, or put your phone down or take breaks; that can be really hard to do. My number one recommendation when I am working with someone who is in one of these highly emotional states, is to try and do a hobby, try and do an activity that allows you to get into flow a little bit, meaning that it is requiring some effort but not too much effort. As an example, I started painting miniatures, these little miniatures that I use for my games. My wife started playing pickleball. I know that some people really like to knit, taking walks. There, there are lots of activities that you can, when you are doing that type of activity that is requiring the brain to hyperfocus on something and it's requiring effort, but not too much effort, just the, the right amount, right, being in the zone, getting in the flow, that is giving enough space for the brain to say, I'm not in danger, I am going to shift from the fast into the slow thinking. It's the same thing. We want to try and find ways to move the brain more into this slow, analytical thinking.

[00:59:17] Bob: Shift into slow thinking. Calm your amygdala. Take a walk. Talk to a friend. Most important, get a sanity check. You're not in this alone. Getting a sanity check from someone you know cares about you is an absolutely critical step, and remember, you can always call AARP's Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360 if you feel you just have no one else to talk to at the moment. For The Perfect Scam, I'm Bob Sullivan.

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[00:59:56] Bob: If you have been targeted by a scam or fraud, you're not alone. Call the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360. Their trained fraud specialists can provide you with free support and guidance on what to do next. Our email address at The Perfect Scam is: theperfectscampodcast@aarp.org, and we want to hear from you. If you've been the victim of a scam or you know someone who has, and you'd like us to tell their story, write to us. That address again is: theperfectscampodcast@aarp.org. Thank you to our team of scambusters; Associate Producer, Annalea Embree; Researcher, Becky Dodson; Executive Producer, Julie Getz; and our Audio Engineer and Sound Designer, Julio Gonzalez. Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For AARP's The Perfect Scam, I'm Bob Sullivan.

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