When Blanca Frías met a man on a dating app in 2014, she had no idea that that encounter would end in a relationship marked by emotional manipulation. He dedicated nice words and affection to her, while gaining her trust with a clear objective: get her money and disappear. It took her four years to put a name to what had happened to her because then no one talked about “love scams.” Aware of the existence of other victims, in 2023 he used his experience to create the National Association Against Scam with Emotional Manipulation (ANCEME). From there he accompanies 300 women and men who deal with silence due to “the shame” and “social judgment” that surrounds this type of deception. What was barely known a decade ago has become a growing problem. The scammers’ technique is the same: seduction, manipulation, isolation…, but they have gone from asking for money to respond to false economic emergencies to multiplying it on paper, encouraging victims to invest in cryptocurrencies through supposedly safe and profitable platforms. What really interests them is that they make more and more investments to increase the illicitly obtained funds. To do this, they usually present themselves with fake profiles, using visually attractive photographs. Since they do not get to meet them physically, they care about projecting confidence and solvency. Dating applications, social networks and investment groups on messaging platforms have become fertile ground for financial scammers. Since the pandemic “its use has increased a lot,” explain sources from the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV). The supervisor recently issued a warning about these scams after detecting more inquiries from concerned citizens. “It is a phenomenon that supervisors from other countries have also informed us about.” The figures provide a measure of the dimension of the problem. Last year, 22,614 procedures were initiated for online scams, which represents 83.43% of the total cases for any type of cybercrime, according to data from the Report of the State Attorney General’s Office. The report draws attention to investment fraud in virtual currencies given its proliferation and “the complexity that can entail monitoring operations and identifying their authors.” To make tracking more difficult, they often invite victims to move social media conversations to encrypted messaging applications. The CNMV traces a pattern: “They look for single people”, whether men or women, “without many social relationships and who spend time connected”, although “anyone can be the target” since there is no single profile. “These types of scams do not attack intelligence,” but rather emotional vulnerability, emphasizes Frías, whose training as an economist did not immunize her against her scammer. “We are talking about people with kidnapped minds.” Sometimes they have gone through a separation, a traumatic event after becoming widowed, or face unwanted loneliness. Therefore, it is necessary that they stop being “singled and revictimized.” When it comes to acting, scammers also use cognitive biases. They are “mental shortcuts that we use to simplify complex decisions,” such as “giving more weight to stories of people who became rich than to real statistics, following what others do without evaluating risks or believing that I control more than I really know,” explains Francisco Rodríguez, director of Financial Studies at Funcas. The analysis center published a statistic this year that shows “the crucial role” of financial education in the decision to invest in digital currencies. People with high confidence in their abilities, but with limited real knowledge, are 75.3% more likely to do so, being able to take risks that they do not understand. To address this problem, financial education is key, considers Blanca Narváez, general director of Fundación Mutualidad. According to several reports from the Savings Observatory of which it is a part, Spanish households present a “significant deficit in financial knowledge”, both in terms of basic concepts such as inflation or interest rates, and in terms of investment products. For this reason, it calls on public powers to “promote these contents from an early age.” Deregulation in the world of cryptoassets, together with the supervisors’ lack of financial literacy and tools to act, served as a catalyst for a regulatory change that came into effect just one year ago: the MiCA regulation. The Prosecutor’s Office points out that it is already «contributing to improving the possibilities of investigation» of investment fraud. The rule requires any company or platform that provides services related to cryptoassets in the European Union to have “prior authorization from the CNMV.” It also “imposes the duty of identification of clients, the registration of operations and the establishment of supervision mechanisms,” explains lawyer Cristina Sánchez, associate of Financial Regulation at Garrigues. Therefore, before investing in a platform recommended by anyone, it is important to “verify” if it is authorized by the CNMV, advises lawyer Enrique Nieto, partner in the Securities Market at Uría Menéndez. And this is because MiCA “does not provide specific mechanisms for recovering money in the event of fraud on unauthorized platforms.” The victim must go to court, where it is not easy to obtain compensation for the commission of the crime. In this scenario in which emotional manipulation and financial fraud converge, the best defense is an informed citizenry aware of the risks.
Organized or single criminals
The Civil Guard has uncovered the functioning of criminal organizations through coups such as Operation Fake James, carried out this year. The networks that operate in Spain can also do so in other countries in Europe or Africa. The structure distributes tasks: some capture the victims, others return the swindled money to the legal circuit. There is no official data on the money being moved, although the aforementioned operation is illustrative: 21 arrested for scamming 1.5 million from 70 people. Individually, agents arrested a person in León in April for fraud involving 350,000 euros.
