ONLINE HOUSING FRAUD: NOT AS NEW AS IT LOOKS
Technology; scams; the Big Con; Western frontier; bandits
The internet creates new crimes for our new century.[i] At any rate, that’s the impression we get. Think of those constant updates we receive from our respective IT Helpdesks, warning us about the latest, greatest online danger – We have detected yet another horrifying threat! It’s just as unique as the last one!! Don’t open any e-mail under any circumstances!!! Think, too, of the vocabulary of cybercrime, which certainly possesses a certain from-the-box freshness: spear phishing; wardriving; bluesnarfing; packet sniffing; evil twins; and whatnot.[ii] But even such brand-new words swiftly assume a shop-worn sound. Undoubtedly, the newest thing about cybercrime is not the crime, but the cyber. Cyber stands for scale, speed, anonymity. It stands for committing the same old crimes, but faster, without the need for a balaclava or getaway car. It stands for criminals who no longer have to commute. They can harass the rest of us from the comfort of their sofa. They can cozy up in bed all day long with their phones.
Of course, new technology has always offered new criminal opportunity. You can be sure that long-ago criminals, hearing for the first time of that brand-new invention, the printing press, immediately turned their thoughts to the question of how to make a swift, questionable buck. Perhaps they would literally make it – forgery must have appeared a pleasant, labour-saving diversion. Or perhaps they could produce blank books with the words Holy Bible on the cover, or at the very least skip the whole pedantic bit about the Ten Commandments. Even before that, paper itself must have got someone excited, the first time he set avaricious eyes on it. It was asking for it, surely; crying out for fraud.
Times changes but people don’t – the old warning is another way of saying that criminal psychology seems to remain consistently greedy, selfish, and conniving.
One thing we can be pretty sure of is that criminals, like you and me, have always tempted by a side-hustle when times grow hard. And you don’t need me to tell you that times have been hard of late. Hence the wildly-proliferating scams you’ve surely heard about, which comes twinned with public-education programmes that attempt to balance them out.
Let’s consider online purchase scams: those in which the victim doesn’t receive what they paid for; receives something of vastly inferior quality than advertised; or receives nothing at all. These scams are all over the place. The psychology behind them is interesting if unsurprising. Victims are more likely to pony up if, first, they are fearful and, second, trust the scammer. Villains know this, and manipulate their scams accordingly. They exploit that old hard-sell technique, Fear Of Missing Out (sometimes known as FOMO) by offering one-time only deals, deals that expire tomorrow, today, next minute. They make sites that appear slick, professional, comforting: perhaps they even slip in the occasional logo that reminds the victim of a familiar brand that they love and trust.
Get the victim fearful, but simultaneously comforted by your presence. You’re half way there already.[iii] A neuroscientist might say that the scammer tries to bypass the brain’s frontal lobes and head straight for the limbic system. That’s the part of the brain associated with the most basic emotions - fear and shock, for instance. It doesn’t concern itself too much with thinking things through.
There is a whole academic literature about so-called persuasive messaging. You can be sure that scammers have either read about the Elaboration Likelihood Model,[iv] or grasp it instinctively. Probably the latter. Want to know why? Well, they’ve been using it since before it was named. Read on.
Researchers in this area have written about ‘old wine in new bottles’[v]: an excellent phrase that sums it up perfectly. In the second week of December, 2023, The Times reported on what, at first sight, looks a pretty new sort of scam.
During the last three years, there has been a marked increase in rental fraud in the UK. In the first eleven months of 2023, losses to victims came to £9 million, (at today’s exchange rate, more than $11 million). That works out at around £2000 (or nearly $2600) per victim. Some scams were more elaborate than others. Some almost appear to occupy the grey area that we associate with certain shady sorts of landlord or their agents. (The derogatory term ‘Rachmanism’ wasn’t invented without reason. Victims of property scams needed a word they could use to refer to those they feared, resented, or just-plain-disliked.)
One scam that is becoming increasingly popular is simply to take an inappropriately-high ‘holding fee’. In England and Wales, landlords are allowed to take a small amount of money to cover their costs while they carry out background checks on the prospective tenant. The limit is one week’s rent, which can be held for no more than two weeks. Naturally, some overcharge. Some delay repayment. Others take the holding fee, keep it, and then demand a deposit, followed by a month’s rent. This is solid Psychology: start the demands on the victim small, but increase them steadily, so that no one single step in the process appears to be very much bigger than the previous one. (Don’t get a psychologist talking about this process, by the way: your only hope of changing the subject will be to blurt out phrases like ‘research ethics’ or ‘Hans Eysenck’, and hope they get distracted.)
Other scammers have been caught demanding fees for services that are supposed to be free.
Much more ambitious are those scammers who offer, and accept money for, properties that don’t even exist. They’ve simply imagined them. When it comes to advertising made-up properties of the sort that benefit, one expects, from plenty of fresh air, Facebook seems to be the scammers’ venue of choice, (although Gumtree is pretty popular, too). Victims are generally super-motivated to secure one of the necessities of life – a place to shelter – in an overheated, madly competitive market, and are frightened of failure.
It can get quite elaborate. Indeed, the whole process resembles what mid-twentieth century villains used to call ‘The Big Con’, in so far as it may extend over a period of actual weeks. The criminal copies pictures and descriptions of real properties – ones that indisputably exist in the real world – and advertises them online. The rent for these non-existent properties is likely to be competitive if not an outright steal. This whips up a lot of interest. Victims learn that they are competing against a ravening hoard of other deep-pocketed parties: hurry, hurry, hurry. The scammer takes a fee, and another fee. And a deposit. And a month’s rent. And then disappears.
No one ever answers the phone. No one ever answers the increasingly-frantic e-mails. The victim turns up at the address to find out that it’s not an address at all. There’s nothing there. Or, if there is, someone else has rented it already, or that it was never on the market to begin with. Fairy step by fairy step, they have been suckered in, fleeced, and abandoned.
Blame Covid again. When we were all sitting at home - unable even to go out for a walk, much less view tangible properties in person – virtual viewings became the norm. Even with restrictions lifted, we seem not to have left the habit behind, or to have forgotten that pictures can be deceiving. They sometime hide the reality, or the lack of it.
Some would say that modern scammers have it easy. It’s much easier to imagine a single property than to conjure up a whole new town out of thin air.
The frontier opened in four stages. Pioneers moved in, cleared a patch of ground, built a cabin, and finally tried to scratch out a living. The next generation were shrewder. They skipped the last two, labour-intensive, stages. They just moved in, cleared a patch of ground, and sold it for building sites. Leave it to other, less-crafty, souls to do the building and scratching.
Even shrewder were those villains who did not bother with the second stage, or even the first, but sold land that existed nowhere outside their own imaginations. One fishy trickster named William Haddock invented an entire community, which he called Rolling Stone. It wasn’t just any community, either, but a thriving one, with its own grand social events, community spirit, public markets. Rolling Stone even its own newspaper, the Messenger. Haddock knew his Psychology as well as any modern-day scammer. You can imagine just how excited they became, back on the east coast, those eager, gullible, would-be frontierspeople. Like lambs queuing for the shears.
Fifty or sixty of them chartered a packetboat down the Ohio. They came onboard carrying maps and circulars and an engraving of Rolling Stone’s Main Street at noon. They asked the sceptical boatmen to drop them off as near to town as possible. ‘Sceptical’, because the boatmen had never heard of the place. It turned out that, when they were at home on the east coast, the William Haddock’s victims had already been already been as close to Rolling Stone as they were ever going to get. They might as well have asked for a ticket to Xanadu, Shangri-La, or El Dorado.
Some immigrants to the invisible town – with its invisible social events, invisible community spirit, and invisible public markets - simply gave up and went home. Others made an honest attempt to settle: imagine their pain. Rolling Stone was as inhospitable as its name implies. Rolling Boulder, more like. Some died. Haddock, meanwhile, remained busy elsewhere, inventing other contented communities.[vi]
Some historians claim that the name ‘William Haddock’ was a pseudonym. Maybe, but there’s reason to doubt. If you had the choice of any name in the world, is ‘Haddock’ the one you’d pick? Surely, a cold, slimy conman would not voluntarily name himself for the slimy coldness of a fish. You’d think a chap who had enough imagination to conjure up a whole town, complete with local newspaper, would pause hardly an instant before christening himself Rex Verity. How about ‘Honest Bob’ Moneymaker or Rocky Strong or Victor Pureheart? Even our own discipline throws up some possibilities. Every forensic psychologist has heard of Monte Buchsbaum and Zebulon Brockway. Surely these are all good, appealing, zippy names for a conman.
Out there on the frontier, you could hardly trust a thing. It wasn’t just towns: almost everything was, or might be, a scam. Currency itself was suspect. There was no law to stop a villain from founding his own personal bank and issuing hundred-dollar bills with his handsome profile on the back. Regular citizens used to walk around carrying Bank Note Detectors, which were books listing all the banks, real or imaginary, their currencies, and actual value. Sometimes, it was literally less than the paper it was printed on. Many citizens on the frontier carried gold instead of cash. It had the advantage of retaining its value, of course, but the distinct disadvantage, then as now, of attracting bandits.
References supplied partly out of academic habit; partly so that you can read more about anything you find particularly interesting.
[i] Dupont, Benoit & Cŏté, Anne-Marie: ‘The insufficient nature of cybercrime statistics’, in 6th International Report – Crime Prevention & Community safety – Preventing Cybercrime, International Centre for the Prevention of Crime, Montreal, 2018, p76
[ii] Sabillon, Begner, Cano, Jeimy, Cavaller, Victor & Serra, Jordi: ‘Cybercrime & Cybercriminals – A comprehensive study’, International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications Security, Vol 4 No 6, June 2016, pp168-171
[iii] Lu, Hui Ling, Chan, Stephanie, Chai, Whistine & Lau, Shi Mian: ‘Examining the infliuence of emoitonal arousal & scam preventive messaging on susceptibility to scams’, Crime Prevention & Community Safety, Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore, 2020
[iv] Sher, PJ & Lee, S: ‘Consumer scepticism & online reviews – an elaboration likelihood model perspective, Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal, 37, 2009, pp137-43
[v] Grabosky, Peter, quoted in Yar, Majid: “Online crime”, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia – Criminology & criminal justice, Oxford University Press USA, 2016, p4
[vi] Coates, Robert M: The Outlaw Years: The history of the land pirates of the Natchez Trace, The Literary Guild of America, New York, 1930, pp199-200