This book focuses on romance fraud and reveals how fraudsters manoeuvre their target victims through conversations from romance and into talk of money without causing the victim alarm. The requests often follow on to intimate messages and photos/videos, again without alarm, which are then kept back and weaponised by the fraudster after the ‘relationship’ ends. I’ve called this ‘romance fraud-enabled sextortion’ as it differs from traditional understandings of sextortion in term of modus operandi, context and impacts. It takes you through criminal interactions between fraudsters and victims, revealing how language is used to define and progress the relationship within each stage of the romance fraud ‘journey’ from the early building rapport through to a more established romance, a partnership involving financial dealings, to the complete distortion of that early relationship, to where the criminal now delivers explicit threats.
This book identifies and examines the various guises and manifestations of fraudsters’ implicit and explicit ‘calls for action’ within the interaction, shown through real conversations between the fraudster and victim, as a crime in progress frozen in time, and how the push and pull of these calls are driven by methods used when the existing method becomes, or appears, less productive or unfeasible. It explores techniques which are appear seamlessly adapted to accommodate the changing victim context (such as victim as romantic partner; victim as protector/co-business partner/carrying out spousal normative behaviours in relation to financial assistance; compromised individual). This is all under the overarching need of the perpetrator to avoid causing the victim alarm or create a red flag through their interaction that would alert them to its true nature.
The distinctive features of this book include the use of empirical data in the form of rarely-available romance fraud interactions between criminals and victims, the use forensic linguistic and criminological theory and methodologies to deliver innovative insights into this psychologically and financially devastating crime. It is also extremely topical as fraud is a growing crime and remains the number 1 fraud type in the UK, is a CJS strategic priority, is the subject of media infotainment proving popular with the general public, yet is still an under-researched area of academia. It also highlights why attempts to protect society through public education appears to be ineffective in stemming the tide of victims, and offers new perspectives and novel insights on criminal interactions that push academic and practitioner boundaries.
Dr Elisabeth Carter's book The Language of Romance Crimes: Interactions of Love, Money and Threat. Cambridge University Press, is available from Cambridge University Press.
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