Traps Beyond the Screen: Love and Investment Scams That Cross Borders

Last time, we looked at Japan’s special fraud carried out over the telephone. Faking a voice, stoking anxiety, stealing away the time to think. An organized structure of deception, with money mules and cash collectors placed at its lowest rungs. It was the old fraud that preys on the gaps in the human heart, dressed in a new tool.

That tool now sits in the palm of our hand. Beyond the smartphone screen lurk countless strangers. Emails that look exactly like the real thing, a lover who captures the heart, an investment said to be a sure win. The internet has become, for the deceiver, a hunting ground of unprecedented breadth. In this chapter, we look at fraud transformed for the age of the internet, not by reenacting the methods, but from the side of psychology and structure, asking why people come to believe. This is a story for protecting ourselves.

The Fake Gateway: The Lure Called Phishing

The word phishing is said to have come into use around the mid-1990s. Back then, those who sought to steal the personal information of users of AOL, a major American service widely used as a gateway to the internet, began to appear. The English word fishing, overlaid with the spelling of phreak, a term for those probing communication networks within hacker culture, is said to have given rise to the word phishing.

The mechanism itself is utterly simple. Prepare a fake gateway made to look real, and lure people into it. An email or message disguised as a bank, a delivery company, or a famous internet service arrives, and for some plausible reason, it guides you to a fake site that looks exactly like the real one. The information entered there is stolen on the spot. Almost nothing technically complex is happening. What the deceiver exploits is not a flaw in the computer, but the workings of the human heart.

Calm down and look, and there are several clues to see through it. The sender’s address is somehow unnatural; a genuine service rarely asks you to enter important information by email; the notice is one you have no memory of. But when chased by anxiety and urgency, people overlook those clues. That is exactly why, when you feel something is suspicious, you should stop once and confirm it again—not through the link in the email, but through the legitimate method you normally use. That single breath, it is said, becomes the greatest defense.

The Fraud That Steals the Heart: A Lover Beyond the Screen

If phishing steals information, the romance scam steals the heart itself. This can be said to be the confidence trick we saw in the fifth chapter of this series—the classic method of gaining a person’s trust and then deceiving them—moved to the stage of social media and dating apps.

The heart of the method lies in building trust over time. The deceiver approaches disguised as an attractive person, exchanges words almost daily, draws close to your worries, and talks of a future together. Many victims come to believe the other is a lover, a partner for life. And only once the relationship has fully deepened does the talk of money first appear. A sudden misfortune, a business opportunity, an investment for the future of the two of you—the reasons vary, but what they share is that the victim can no longer bring themselves to doubt the other.

What matters here is not to laugh at those deceived as fools. The wish to believe in people, to love someone, is the most natural and most precious of human workings. The romance scam turns that very preciousness against its victim. That is why the harm can befall not only those carrying loneliness and anxiety, but also people living ordinary days. Among the victims reported, there are not a few people of social standing, or people who ought to have been cautious. To have loved is no sin. The sin lies with the one who preyed upon that heart. Lose this perspective, and we wound the victim a second time.

Harm That Crosses Borders: The Lie of a Sure Win

Another great current of internet fraud is investment fraud built around crypto assets. Romance fraud and investment fraud are reported to often appear intertwined. From someone you have grown close to, a certain investment is recommended. At first the sum is small, and the screen displays a profit as if real gains had truly come. When the victim who believed invests an even larger sum, then one day, the very moment they try to withdraw, everything vanishes—such a structure has been reported in many places.

The lie the deceiver shows here shares the same psychological root as the Ponzi scheme we saw in the fourth chapter. A sure win; you alone have gained a special opportunity; if you do not move now, you will lose out. It lights, at once, the fire of human greed and human haste. What differs is that the stage crosses borders. The victim is in Japan, and the deceiver is across the sea. The money changes form into crypto assets, passes through several countries, and vanishes. Tracing it is difficult, and recovering it is said to be no easy matter.

The tools keep changing. Email, social media, dating apps, crypto assets. Yet the place the deceiver aims for has not changed at all since civilization began. Anxiety, loneliness, greed, and the heart that tries to believe in people. No matter how far technology advances, what we must protect in the end is the very workings of our own hearts.

And the technology that preys upon that heart is now entering a new stage. A voice exactly like the real thing, a face exactly like the real thing—shaking the very boundary between lie and truth.