You Are Not Alone in Falling Victim to Online Scams
If you have been a victim of one of these Pig Butchering online scams, you may be feeling kind of low about yourself that maybe you did something wrong, or maybe you were stupid or vulnerable. Well, that’s not really the case. Here’s a perfect example from an article on MoneyWise via Yahoo, where a retired law enforcement officer lost their entire life savings $87,000 to an online fraud. We hear this all the time. We talk to hundreds of people a day, many of them are professionals executives, attorneys, accountants, CEOs who have lost money **to** these scams.
Scammers Use Psychological Tactics to Deceive Victims
It’s not the fault of the victim. These scammers are very, very sophisticated in how they communicate. They have on-staff psychiatrists and psychologists who know how to word all of their messaging. They know how to write **content** and posts to get you to respond to them, and they usually drag it out over a long period of time. One of the biggest ways to create trust is to not try to rush things. They take days, weeks, sometimes even months to build up a sense of confidence. They never ask you for money. They never ask you for anything, and then, once you’ve built up trust, they can take your money.
Steps to Take if You Have Lost Money
So, the first thing to do is, if you’ve been a victim and lost money, don’t feel bad about it. Then, what do you do next? How do you get it back? How do you work on recovering it? Well, there’s a clue to one method in this article: some victims can’t get their money back because they didn’t report it within 30 days. Even within 30 days, you can’t always get it back from the bank, but sometimes you can so try that first.
Exploring Third-Party Liability and Digital Forensics
Next, you’re going to look at what’s called third-party liability. There are many ways that third parties may be liable for returning your money. Then, you want to explore things like digital forensics and open-source intelligence to discover the flow of funds and asset tracing. These topics are more advanced than what we’re going to cover here, but if you click the link below, we have a lot of information about victims’ recovery of funds from Ponzi schemes and online scams. These scams are happening all the time, all over the country, affecting victims from blue-collar workers to executives.
Take Action and Don’t Blame Yourself
Don’t feel like you’re the only one who did something wrong. Take action. Don’t hide in a closet because you lost money. Don’t feel ashamed, because it’s not an indication of who you are as a person. These scammers are insidious and evil, preying on people to take their money.
