Most Scam Advice Is Useless — Real Cases Show Why
Scams usually start when and where everything seems normal. Like the latte you sip in a café halfway up a hill, mountain view through a big window.
My friend talked about her newly-encountered online friend — a sunny, masculine guy with nice teeth, 28 Facebook connections, a few photos, mostly selfies. She was pleased that someone seemed to care for her.
I was suspicious.
“Are you sure he just wants to be friends?”
“Yes, he never asked to borrow money.”
“Did you mean he never inquired about your financial status?”
My friend hesitated a bit. “Oh, he asked if I own properties or have investments.”
“And what did you say?”
“I lied. Since I don’t know him well, I said I live in a small apartment and still owe a financial company a big loan.”
“Excellent answer. You protected yourself well. Yet I think your new friend will disappear soon enough.”
A few weeks later, my friend told me that the sunny guy got distant and then disappeared completely.
My friend still doesn’t think it was a scam. She genuinely believes he was just too busy, and their conversation ran out of steam naturally.
This was how a small scam attempt started and ended. It started from a normal conversation — perhaps a John Wayne–style “Hello, there” in a chat box — to a point you never consider would ever turn out to be something unfortunately extraordinary.
APG Typologies Annual Report — cases of scams, frauds, and money laundering.
Last year I was assigned to translate the APG (Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering) Typologies Annual Reports — 2023 and 2024 — covering cases of scams, frauds, and money laundering.
I truly enjoyed them, especially the case studies from member countries — Ponzi schemes, smuggling operations, drug trafficking, romance scams, investment frauds, casino junkets. All fascinating in their own way.
The criminals involved were far from ordinary. Many of them were remarkably intelligent and daring. They had to recruit associates, set up channels, create layers, move money around, and still avoid law enforcement. And very often, they seemed utterly convinced that they would never get caught.
But what struck me most was not their intelligence. It was the way they caught the victims. Like spiders weaving webs, they were patient, calculating, and methodical. The victims, most of the time, did not even realise when they had stepped into the trap. That was the most dangerous part. It looked so normal. Sometimes it even looked legitimate.
The Core Pattern
Here is one case from Taiwan in 2020. An app promised members an average daily return of 2 percent on the virtual pets they purchased, plus another 5 to 10 percent if they referred more members into the scheme. The group promoted the app through LINE investment chat groups and even held seminars. Members were asked to link their own phone numbers to their personal bank accounts so they could trade virtual pets, purchase more pets, and receive or remit funds through the platform. Then, one day, the platform disappeared without warning.
It looked like an investment platform. In fact, it was a collection system, running only until the operators decided to stop.
The virtual pet app case, like many other scam cases, followed a similar pattern.
First, there is a situation that feels slightly off. In this case, it was the idea of investing in virtual pets. Strange, yes. But not strange enough to make everyone walk away. The digital world had already trained people to accept invisible assets, app-based transactions, and online communities as normal. So the oddness was there, but not enough to stop the process.
Then comes a plausible explanation. The platform did not just present an odd idea; it wrapped that idea in a system. Daily returns. Referral profits. Trading among members. LINE chat groups. Seminars. Once there is a structure, people relax a little. The strange thing begins to look less strange.
Then comes increasing urgency. Not always the loud kind. Not necessarily someone shouting that you must act now. In many scam cases, urgency arrives in a quieter form: momentum. New virtual pets being released. Chat groups staying active. Seminars pushing enthusiasm. Referral rewards encouraging quick participation. It creates the sense that one should act now, before the opportunity moves elsewhere.
And then there is the decision point. This is the moment that really matters. In this case, it came when members linked their bank accounts, transferred funds, and began purchasing assets that existed only within that system. Each step may have felt small. Procedural, even. But that was the point where hesitation turned into participation. By the time the platform disappeared, the real damage had already been done. The loss did not begin when the platform vanished. It began much earlier, at the moment when people decided to enter the system as if it were real.
What Went Wrong? Why it’s difficult for people to realise they are already in a trap.
Most of the time it’s not because the victims failed to detect that something was wrong. It’s because they were pushed to take action and acted too quickly.
When people started to hesitate, the scammers often added a sense of urgency to push the transaction and create pressure. Sentences such as:
- “This needs to be handled immediately…”
- “Your account may be locked by now…”
- “If we don’t act now…”
- “The bank will close in 30 minutes…”
- “The once-in-a-lifetime promotion ends tonight, exactly 6 hours left…”
With such time pressure, the hesitation people once had shrank quickly as their attention was diverted to another, more urgent matter — a golden investment opportunity, a loved one’s life at risk, a bank account in jeopardy, or any emergency that cannot afford to wait.
People fell into the trap not because they could not differentiate a scam from a proper transaction, but because they were directed to make a decision under a time constraint that allowed them little or no window to act on the hesitation they once had.
And this is why conventional advice misses — it assumes people have time to work through their doubts.
Why Most Advice Fails
Most advice assumes you’ll recognise the scam and then decide. But recognition and decision don’t happen in that order — scammers know how to set up the trap to make everything look normal, and when people feel something is off, it is often too late to back out.
For example, a member newly joined to an investment club might receive the promised returns when starting with a small amount. When he puts in a bigger amount, he might be told there was a small glitch in an overseas bank, so he could only receive half of what he invested. A few days later he finally receives the remainder. Then comes an anniversary promotion, and he decides to invest an even bigger lump sum. Like before, he is told his investment has performed very well, and he decides it is harvest time. Again there are regular “glitches,” and he is told the withdrawal will take a little bit longer. But soon “a little bit longer” extends to weeks, and eventually, one day, the investment app is shut down abruptly, without prior announcement.
This was typical — the signal was there. But since the scammer had been able to resolve the “glitches” previously, it turned an abnormal, alarming situation into something normal. So the signal was ignored, almost completely.
Then what actually helps? The best approach is to set up a rule simple enough for anyone to apply under pressure.
Most victims failed because they did not verify properly — most of the time they simply listened to the scammer’s and their accomplices’ narratives. The criminals were smart enough to wrap the narrative in a controlled, closed web — the members of the investment club in the chatroom, the bank clerk at the other end of the forwarded call, the prosecutor referred to them by the policeman reporting the bank account lockout — they might all be accomplices.
Most scammers succeeded because they were good at pressuring people with all kinds of urgency. They detected the victims’ hesitation; therefore, they pushed even harder.
The Minimal Rules
From reading and translating the APG reports, I concluded three simple rules:
Rule 1: If there is pressure, you wait. Urgency is a scammer’s primary tool. Deadlines, threats, emergencies, limited-time offers — these are all designed to shorten your thinking time and override your natural caution. If someone pushes you to act now, the correct response is always to pause.
Rule 2: If you have not independently verified who they are, you do not send money. You should never send money to someone unverified. “Unverified” does not mean unknown. A person can sound credible, have an impressive profile, and communicate with confidence — and still need to be verified.
Rule 3: If you cannot verify, you do not proceed. Never rely on information provided by the person you are evaluating. Scammers control their own narrative — they will give you phone numbers that go to accomplices, links to fake websites, and documents that look official. Independent verification means going outside their system. If verification is blocked, discouraged, or met with frustration, that response is itself your answer.
You don’t need to be certain something is a scam. You just need to stop long enough to verify. The key word is “verification” — if you are not sure, do not do anything.
These three rules became the spine of a short guide I later put together under my new pen name, Aaron Wells. How Not to Get Scammed doesn’t try to explain scams. It focuses on what to do at exactly the moment you are about to make a decision under pressure — which is the only moment that actually matters.
I want to help people avoid being scammed. Good people deserve to be protected.
You do not need to understand every scam. You only need to avoid one mistake at a time. The objective is not to engage better. It is to not engage when it matters.
You don’t need to remember everything in this guide. You only need to remember it at the moment you are about to act.
This can help you.
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