Romance Scam Prevention Guidelines
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
The purpose of this research is to study the causes and provide guidelines to prevent romance scam victimization. The qualitative research method was employed by conducting in-depth interviews with 22 key informants. There were 3 groups of key informants: 1) 10 victims who made the record or reported to the police station; 2) 10 chief inquiry officers from the Technology Crime Suppression Division (TCSD) and the Police Cyber Taskforce (PCT) of the Royal Thai Police; and 3) 2 system administrators.
The results revealed 3 causes of romance scam victimization: 1) lack of experience, 2) love, fascination, the habit of showing love, and 3) greed. Guidelines to prevent romance scam victimization were proposed for 2 main schemes as follows, 1) suppression of offenders; for example, the government should accelerate the process of freezing proxy bank accounts used as a tool for offenders to commit crimes; and 2) victim’s self-protection: people must live their lives carefully with conscious decision when making friends via online platforms.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Published Manuscripts are the copyright of the Journal of the Justice System. However; the opinions that appeared in the content are the sole responsibility of the author.
References
Action Fraud. (n.d.). Romance scams on the up during lockdown. https://www.actionfraud.police
uk/fauxmance
Cormack, L. (2017). More than $25 million lost in online dating and romance scam in 2016. The Sydney morning herald. The Sydney morning herald. https://www. smh.com.au/business //consumer-affairs/more-than-25-million-lost-in-online-dating-and-romance-scams-in-2016-20170210-guacga.html
Crime news team. (2022). Warning about the "Romance Hybrid Scam" gang tricking people into falling in love and inviting them to invest Statistics reveal that in 8 months the damage increased to 861 million. Online manager. https://mgronlinecom/crime/detail /9650000105929
Fletcher, E. (2022, February 10). Reports of romance scams hit record highs in 2021. Federal Trade Commission. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spotlight/
/02/reports-romance-scams-hit-record-highs-2021
Kemp, S. (2022, January 26). Digital 2022: Global Overview Report. Datareportal. https://datare
portal.com/reports/digital-2022-global-overview-report
Nyam, I. H. (2020). Tackling Online Dating Scams and Fraud. The International Journal Of Humanities & Social Studies. 8(11), 189-190.
Sawatree Suksri. (2017). Computer/Cybercrime and criminological theory. Journal of Law, 46(2), 426-427.
Tossapon Tassanakunlapan. (2019). Limitations of the justice process to prevent and suppress romantic crimes (Romance Scam) and ways to raise public awareness. https://www.law.
ac.th/law2011/journal/e1586790886.pdf