Every day, bank systems flag suspicious transactions. Unusual amounts. Repeated transfers to new payees. Patterns that don't match the customer's normal behaviour.
In that moment - when a fraud analyst or customer service representative reaches out to a flagged account holder - there is a window. A small, often underestimated window where the right intervention can stop everything.
But what happens in that window depends almost entirely on whether the person on the other side of the call understands what they are actually dealing with. Not just a suspicious transaction. A human being in the middle of one of the most sophisticated psychological operations they will ever experience.
Victims of social engineered fraud have been part of a reality that has been constructed around them - every interaction scripted, every emotion engineered, every payment a rational act inside a world that turned out to be a lie.
"Trust hasn't disappeared. It's been transferred - from the financial institution to the criminal. And they've sometimes spent months getting to that point."
The Experience No One Talks About
When we talk about fraud, we almost always talk about money. "So how much did you give away?" But the financial loss is often the smallest part of what a victim carries.
Fraud - especially romance fraud, investment fraud, and friendship fraud - is an immersive experience. Victims don't stumble into a scam. They are cast in one. Everything is scripted and produced. The relationship feels real because it is designed to feel real, with the care and precision of a long-running theatre production. The mental devastation of discovering that is routinely undermined in how we talk about this crime.
Having trusted - and sometimes loved - someone who never existed, never cared, is a particular kind of grief. A 2023 anthropological study from Center mod Økonomisk IT-Svindel in Denmark - one of the only studies of its kind - found that victims of romance fraud had taken their own lives as a direct consequence of the crime. That is the human scale of what we are dealing with. Beyond that, the consequences routinely include foreclosures, bankruptcies, divorces, and job losses. The correlation between economic difficulty and poor mental health is well-established. All of this is enough to break people.
What Is Actually Happening Inside the Victim
I sometimes try to explain the experience of being in an active scam like being on a Ferris wheel that keeps going faster.
At first it feels exciting - you think you're in control. But then it speeds up. Faster, faster, too fast to think. You can't step off. You're just holding on.
Scammers keep victims in a constant state of motion - reactive, not reflective. They engineer what psychologists call "hot states" intentionally. Pressure. Deadlines. Isolation. Fear. Small threats, just enough to destabilise. Your brain is flooded with dopamine, cortisol, adrenaline - fight-or-flight takes over, logic shuts down, and dependence deepens.
Not stupidity - chemistry. Not weakness - manipulation.
The numbers reflect that pattern. According to TSB's 2025 data, romance fraud victims make an average of 11 payments per case before discovering the scam, losing around £7,500 before the spell breaks - and romance scam payments overall have jumped 37% year on year. These are not single, impulsive transfers. They are the residue of months spent inside an engineered relationship.
People ask: How could they not know? And I get why that question comes, but that question misunderstands what's happening. This isn't a failure of intelligence. The body is in survival mode. Logic has left the building. And when a victim says they didn't feel like they were doing anything wrong - believe them. We don't feel like we’re lying. We're just obeying orders.
The Waiting Room
I've spoken to many bank employees who find it frustrating when victims seem to resist help - who won't confirm they're being scammed, or who actively work around fraud checks. I understand that frustration. But I want to offer a different frame.
By the time a bank calls to raise the alarm, the criminal has already won the trust that the institution once had. From where the victim is standing, the bank is the devil and the scammer is the angel. That change is not confusion -> it is the intended outcome of months of work.
Because sometimes there is a period in the scam where a victim has been warned, or has felt in their gut that something is wrong, but cannot bring themselves to stop. I call this the waiting room.
Imagine sitting outside a doctor's office. You know the news is likely bad. The time in the waiting room becomes a kind of safety - you don't want to move, because moving means walking through that door and having to face what's on the other side. It is safer, for a moment, to stay inside the uncertainty than to step into a truth that will demand everything of you.
That is not denial. That is a human being protecting themselves for as long as they can before the world collapses.
The Cruelest Part
What makes socially engineered fraud uniquely devastating is this: it is one of the few crimes where the victim actively participates in their own undoing. The money was sent willingly. The information was given freely. The relationship was chosen.
That realisation - when it comes - is crushing. And what often follows is not just self-blame, but confirmation from the world around them that the blame is deserved. The question "how did you not see it?" does more damage than most people realise.
What Financial Institutions Can Do Differently
As someone with lived experience, a background in user experience design, and now a professional with a focus on social engineering -> I can say this with confidence: the intervention window exists, and it matters what happens inside it.
Good friction, at the right moment, delivered with the right language, can reach someone even in a hot state. It doesn't have to be a lecture. It doesn't have to be accusatory. It can be a pause. A question asked with genuine curiosity rather than suspicion. A moment that gives the nervous system a second to breathe.
Trauma-informed language is not a luxury for sensitive cases. It is the baseline competency required to reach victims of this crime. The difference between "are you sure you want to send this?" and a carefully worded intervention that names what is happening - without shame - can be the difference between a victim stopping and continuing.
We also need institutions to understand that when a victim eventually comes forward, they are often coming from the waiting room. They are not ready to be interrogated about why it took so long. They need to be believed. They need someone to understand that the person they trusted - and sometimes loved - turned out to be a performance. And that is a grief that deserves to be met with care.
Victims don't need to be told they were foolish. They need to be told they were targeted by professionals who do this for a living.
We will not stop fraud by asking individuals to be more vigilant in a hot state. But we can build processes that recognise the hot state when they see it, that intervene with empathy rather than friction, and that receive survivors as the complex, human people they are.
That is not a small ask. But it is a possible one.
This piece is Part 2 of After the Alert, a 3-part guest series exploring the operational and human reality of stopping fraud in real time. Part 3, Tackle Consumer Scams with Innovation and Interdiction by Ken Palla, publishes next Wednesday.
