Romance scams represent a form of online crime with origins in the physical world, including FTF and physical mail scams. Although these crimes have been revolutionized by the affordances inherent in the technological advantages of social media and the internet, less is known about the foreground characteristics of the offense, including the preferred targeting and scamming strategies of romance fraudsters as facets of a larger process of communication and deception between offenders and victims. Much of the research has focused on the existence and mechanics of such fraud schemes and less on how reciprocal communication between offenders and victims, governed by measurable principles of impression management and deception can underpin the overt manipulation of victims into parting with their financial resources. Our goal in the current research is to identify risk and protective factors for those targeted by romance scam offenders to develop a model for victim vulnerability and resilience. Using data developed through a systematic collection of victim recounts of their scamming experiences from online sources (N_female = 32 and N_male = 20), our findings point to a reciprocal model between victims and offenders through identifying four main themes in victims’ descriptions of their scamming experiences. Such an effort allows us to delineate important risk signals we identify as crucial for future research and prevention efforts. The findings of this study speak to the importance of understanding social and behavioral interactions between victims and offenders during a romance scam as critical to establishing risk and protective factors of victims, which further inform preemptive prevention efforts.

浪漫诈骗是一种起源于现实世界的在线犯罪形式，包括 FTF 和实体邮件诈骗。尽管社交媒体和互联网的技术优势所固有的可供性使这些犯罪发生了革命性变化，但人们对犯罪的前景特征知之甚少，包括作为更大的交流过程的各个方面，浪漫骗子的首选目标和诈骗策略罪犯和受害者之间的欺骗。大部分研究都集中在此类欺诈计划的存在和机制上，而较少关注罪犯和受害者之间的相互沟通，受印象管理和欺骗的可衡量原则的约束，如何支持公开操纵受害者以放弃其财务资源。我们在当前研究中的目标是为浪漫诈骗罪犯的目标确定风险和保护因素，以开发受害者脆弱性和恢复力模型。使用通过系统收集受害者从在线资源讲述他们的诈骗经历而开发的数据（N_女性= 32 和 N_男性= 20），我们的研究结果通过确定受害者对其诈骗经历的描述中的四个主要主题，指出了受害者和罪犯之间的互惠模型。这样的努力使我们能够描述我们认为对未来研究和预防工作至关重要的重要风险信号。这项研究的结果说明了了解浪漫骗局中受害者和犯罪者之间的社会和行为互动的重要性，这对于确定受害者的风险和保护因素至关重要，这进一步为先发制人的预防工作提供了信息。