The online dating romance scam is a relatively new and under-reported international crime with serious financial and emotional consequences. Little is known about psychological characteristics that may put people at risk of victimization. This study was interested in the typology of victims of this crime. This website includes information on the scams and scammers, and a discussion forum used by members to exchange information and offer support. The majority of site users are victims, but others who have an interest but have not themselves been defrauded also visit it. With the moderators’ permission, we were able to post a recruitment message on the forum. In the period from 17th May to 8th September 2011, 603 individuals accessed the survey. Of these, 405 completed it fully and indicated that their data could be used for analysis in their answer to the second informed consent item at the end of the questionnaire. Variables include the following: Country (country of residence); DOB (date of birth); Sex; sexuality, status (relationship status), length (longest amount of time spent in a relationship), education (level), job, job status, income, how_ recruited, interview (if want to be followed up), sample (where recruited), ISE (total internet self efficacy score), UCLA (loneliness scale score), BSSS (sensation seeking score), love finds (love finds a way score), One and only (one and only score), idealisation (idealisation score), tot_romanticism, extraversion, openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, tricked by, age, type of victim, lost cash or not. This project investigated the types of people conned by the online romance scam and how such deception psychologically affects a person, as well as the types of strategies that scammers use to con their victims. Specifically, the objectives of the research are to: (1) Devise a typology of the personality traits as well as other characteristics for the types of individuals who are more likely to be conned by the online romance scam. (2) Examine the persuasive techniques employed to con individuals. (3) Examine the psychological consequences of being taken in by such a scam. (4) Inform interested parties of the results of this project to help prevent these scams from happening in the first place.

Online daters (N=853) and participants recruited from a victim support site (N=397) completed a battery of online questionnaires. Some of the participants were recruited from a large online dating site. Recruitment emails were sent to over 250,000 individuals who had been active on the company’s UK sites for over 38 days. In the period from 21st March to 18th July 2011, 1096 individuals accessed the survey. Of these, 853 completed it fully and indicated that their data could be used for analysis at the end of the questionnaire. Participants were also recruited from a volunteer-run website set up to support romance scam victims. Data were collected using a questionnaire hosted on the Qualtrics online survey platform. The questionnaire comprised a number of scales, represented online using individual or matrix-style layouts with responses entered via radio buttons, drop-down menus or free text entry as appropriate. Progression through the questionnaire was controlled by disabling browser ‘back’ buttons. Respondents were able to leave the questionnaire then return to the same point later. Given occasional concerns about the validity of online psychological tests (e.g. Buchanan, 2007), all the scales chosen had previously been used successfully in online research projects that produced findings consistent with the scales being valid and reliable measures. Personality traits were measured using a five-factor personality inventory validated for use online by Buchanan, Johnson and Goldberg (2005). This 41-item inventory gives measures of Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Sensation Seeking was measured using the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (BSSS; Hoyle, Stephenson, Palmgreen, Lorch & Donohew, 2002). This is a widely used 8-item scale that addresses the same construct as Zuckerman’s ‘gold standard’ measure of sensation seeking, the SSS-V (Zuckerman, Eysenck & Eysenck, 1978). Its brevity makes it more suitable for use online. It has been used successfully in internet-mediated research (e.g., Peter & Valkenburg, 2011, albeit with a reduced item set). While the BSSS can be scored in terms of four subscales, for current purposes only the overall sensation seeking score was calculated. Romantic Beliefs were measured using the scale of that name (Sprecher & Metts, 1989). This comprises 15 items measuring four distinct sets of beliefs (Love finds a way, One and only, Idealization and Love at first sight). It has previously been used in unpublished online research by the present authors (Authors, 2009), and found to have acceptable reliability with an alpha of .86 in an online survey of 8088 members of an online dating site. Loneliness was measured using the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell, 1996), a 20-item scale providing a global measure of loneliness. The measure has been administered online in full (Baker & Oswald, 2010) and abbreviated (Hollenbaugh, 2011) versions and shown to be reliable when used in that format. Respondents also completed the Internet Self-Efficacy Scale (Eastin & LaRose, 2000).