Here a scammer, there a scammer: the psychology of romance scams

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My mom died just over two years ago. She and my dad were together for most of their lives; they married young, right out of uni, and stayed together until she died.

Since then, my dad’s tried to get back in the dating game. He fell prey to a romance scammer, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort over the last year trying to teach him how to spot romance scam accounts.

About the same time, Quora, a site I am on frequently, became buried in an absolute tsunami of romance scammers. A combination of lax moderation, poor site design, and weak defenses against spam makes Quora pretty much Ground Zero on the Internet for romance scammers; you’ll find more of them on Quora than you will even on dating sites.

This is fairly typical of a romance scammer account on Quora. There are tens of thousands of these accounts; this particular one is using a stolen photo of porn performer Violet Starr. Romance scammers often use stolen photos of celebrities, porn stars, OnlyFans models, and Instagram models in their fake profiles.

I spend about half an hour to an hour a day reporting romance scam accounts on Quora, typically between 150 and 200 a day. On a light day, I’ll only report 100 or so; on heavy days, I’ve reported 300 scam accounts in a single day.

I know it’s a bit like holding back the tide with a broom, but Quora’s been good to me; I’ve met many friends and even a lover and co-author on Quora, so I try to do what I can to make it a better place than I found it.

I am planning to write an essay about how to spot romance scammers.

This is not that essay.

Instead, I want to share an observation I’ve made. I think romance scam accounts are painfully obvious, and easy to spot; they all basically have the same shape, the same feel. You can even oftentimes spot what country the romance scammer is in by the way they mangle English, because nearly all romance scammers do not speak English as a first language.

For example, “Hello dear” and “Kindly let’s” are tipoffs to scammers in India. In fact, Indian scammers loooove the word “kindly” and use it everywhere. Forgetting to use first person pronouns is something you usually only see in Nigerian scammers who speak Yoruba as a native language. “I need urgently” often means Myanmar. Leaving out indefinite articles is typical of scammers who speak Russian natively.

Specific phrases also give scammers away. “Do the needful:” unique to India. “Angry against” instead of “angry at:” Myanmar. “Please quickly:” India again. Using “at” in place of “have:” Nigeria.

Nigerian scammers confuse A and E in English words, so will say “massage me” instead of “message me.” “Looking for serious relation” instead of “””looking for a serious relationship” pops up over and over in scammer profiles.

Some folks claim the poor English is deliberate, to put off people who are smart enough to catch the scam and therefore represent a waste of effort. I think that’s true in phishing emails but I don’t think it’s true of romance scammers; I think romance scammers are genuinely doing the best they can with limited English.

Yet despite how obvious they are, people still fall for them.

Not only that, there are men I call “concentrators,” men who seem uniquely susceptible to romance scammers. You’ll see a guy who follows 800 other profiles on social media, and 780 of them are clearly romance scammers. Everyone they interact with, every post they comment on, is clearly a romance scammer.

I call these people “concentrators,” because their social media connection map concentrates romance scammers extremely efficiently.

I’ve spent a lot, I mean a lot, of time over the past year thinking about that. Why are romance scammers so effective when they’re so obvious? What causes a concentrator to follow hundreds of romance scam accounts? Clearly, despite how obvious they are, their pitch is precisely tuned to a specific type of psychology. What is it?

I’ve now looked at thousands of romance scam accounts, and I recently had an insight:

Romance scammers don’t behave like women. They behave like thirsty, desperate, sexually frustrated men.

This is, I believe, absolutely key to their success. It’s the realization that makes everything else obvious.

Consider:

A genuine woman does not post photos of herself scantily clad with her private contact information and complaints about how much she needs a man. Even OnlyFans performers don’t do this.

This is the behavior of a sexually frustrated man with few social skills, someone who lacks the empathy or experience to understand why woman don’t do this. Women don’t behave this way because, of course, it’s an invitation to get flooded with rape threats, dick pics, commentary on their bodies, slut-shaming, and religious diatribes.

I mean, even women who don’t behave this way get slammed with this sort of garbage. My wife has shared with me some of the comments and DMs she gets from horny men, and brother, let me just say, there’s a reason a lot of men struggle for female companionship.1

Romance scammers behave the way incel men wish that women would behave.

That’s the secret.

There is, I think, a certain kind of man who struggles to get outside his own head, who has difficulty understanding the perspectives or experiences of others, who re-creates the entire world in his own image.2

That’s the target of romance scammers, who have learned through trial and error that the way to target such men is to hold up a mirror in front of them, dressed in the drag of an OnlyFans performer.

We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. Lonely men respond to reflections of their own loneliness.

[1] You’re in her DMs. I’m getting screenshots of her DMs with messages like “check out this loser, have you ever seen anyone with such terrible social skills?” We are not the same.

[2] There are woman who do this as well, of course, but I think that female romance scam victims aren’t among them, there’s something else going on.

We made it!

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Somehow, against all odds, we survived the dumpster fire of 2025, so we can now welcome the endless possibilities of 2026.

I’m feeling surprisingly optimistic about 2026. Despite all signs to the contrary, I think it has the potential to be a good year. I’ve got more than a few irons in the fire bookwise, with two books coming out this year and a third almost finished, the extended polyfamily is planning a trip to Reykjavik near the end of the year, and several large-scale maker projects are finally nearing completion.

I was born in 1966, so 2026 is a bit of a milestone. In honor of so many decades on this spinning ball in the vast frozen empty void, I plan over the next year to blog about this strange and relentlessly eccentric life I’ve lived so far: adventures, relationships, mistakes I’ve made, things I’ve learned along the way, as a way to reflect on the road that led me here.

It hasn’t always been a smooth ride, but I’ve arrived in a place where I am deeply, deeply happy in all of my relationships, and I am profoundly grateful to have these moments in the sun. (I’ve spent about thirteen and a half billion years, give or take, not existing, and a handful of decades existing. Existing is better.)

Here’s to warm wishes to all of you out there for a happy, prosperous, safe, and joyous 2026, despite the odds.

Cheers!

Thoughts from the Jury Box

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I got called for jury duty a few months back, and ended up seated for voir dire for a case that quite frankly scared the shit out of me. I wasn’t selected, something I’m still not sure if I’m relieved or disappointed about, but man, there’s no way the prosecution would ever have allowed me within a thousand feet of that jury.

I have never served on a jury. I’ve been called many times, of course, but it’s always gone the same way. “Number 17, what do you do for a living?” “Well, I’m a computer programmer, and I also—” “Thank you, Number 17, you’re dismissed.” That’s happened in Florida, Georgia, and Oregon.

I didnd’t say that this time. I haven’t done development work in far too long. When I showed up, they gave us these fluorescent nametags to wear, because apparently at some point in the past a juror seated at a trial went to a restaurant for lunch, the prosecutors sat down nearby, and proceded to talk about the case unaware a juror sat next to them, and caused an expensive mistrial.

I knew something weird was up when they called us for voir dire. They’d been calling people out of the pool room all morning, but this time, they called twice as many potential jurors than normal, 48 of us. So many of us that we couldn’t all fit in the space reserved for potential jurors.

The prosecution talked to us for a while. “This is a rape case,” she said. “I’m going to ask you all a list of questions. You’re required to answer honestly. Has anyone here ever been physically abused by a romantic partner?”

I and a handful of other people raised our hands.

Then it got weird.

“Has anyone here ever heard the expression ‘junkies lie’?” she said. “Are you able to believe the testimony of a victim even if you’re aware the victim is addicted to drugs like heroin?”

“Do you believe that people suffering from mental illness are trustworthy? Would you be able to believe someone’s testimony even if you knew she had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder?”

“Would you be able to believe the testimony of a victim even if you knew she had made false accusations in the past?”

Then it got really weird.

“Suppose a victim recanted her testimony and told you that she had not been assaulted. Would you be able to look at her original testimony with an open mind?”

“Would you automatically assume that the defendant were not guilty if the victim refused to testify against him during the trial?”

“If the victim testified for the defense to say that she didn’t think he should be convicted, would you still be able to convict?”

Then she dropped a doozy:

“Do you accept that in the court system in Oregon, the job of determining guilt or innocence is separate from the job of passing sentence? If you personally felt that a defendant was guilty, but you believed the defendant was facing a sentence you considered harsh or undeserved, would you still be able to return a verdict of ‘guilty,’ knowing that deciding on a sentence was the judge’s job, not yours?”

The defense attorney had a much shorter list of questions, but one of them really jumped out at me:

“Does anyone here believe that men can abuse women, but it is impossible for a woman to abuse a man?”

It took quite a long time for the two sides to choose twelve people for the jury. I was not, as you might imagine, one of them. I suspect saying “yes” to “have you been physically abused by a romantic partner” did me before the process even got started.

I have no idea how that case panned out or what happened to the defendant, but I have to say if I’d been on the jury, I’d’ve quite likely found it very hard to convict him, given only what I know from the prosecutor during voir dire.

Visions of Llanddarog

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I’d never been to Wales before.

The circumstances around the trip sucked. My metamour (my girlfriend’s girlfriend) received a catastrophic medical diagnosis (cancer), so she and my girlfriend decided on short notice to get married. In Wales, where they live, naturally.

The extended polycule did an absolutely bang-up job of pulling the whole thing together on frightfully short notice. My Talespinner and I ended up in an AirBnB in Llanddarog with Eunice, her fiancé, and her girlfriend.

Wales is…um. Wales is very.

Getting there was a whole ordeal, filled with airline snafus and almost-missed connections and ticketing problems…more on that later, perhaps. Once we arrived in London, things took a turn for the weird.

So there we were, a bevy of Americans and Londoners in a rented minibus on the way to Wales. What can go wrong, you ask? Well, now, let me tell you.

Wales is a place where their understanding of “roads” is more or less hypothetical. In Wales, you’ll often find yourself on a one-lane dirt track with trees on both sides, and you’ll like it, because that’s all you get.

Driving in Wales is bonkers. Driving in Wales at night in the rain is utterly absurd, a bizarre mix of high comedy and desperate panic.

Once we arrived, though…

Once we arrived, Wales turned out to be cold, wet, cold, foggy, cold, and almost indescribably beautiful.

That photo up top? It’s the view out the wondow in the room I shared with my Talespinner in Paxton View Barn, a converted barn at Bryngwendraeth Farm.

That tiny tower waaaaay off in the distance in the left is Paxton Tower, a Victorian folly erected in honor of Lord Nelson, or so the story goes (I find it much more likely that the dude who bilt it didn’t much give a toss about Admiral Nelson and just liked the view).

Everything about Wales is breathtakingly gorgeous, even if it is brutally, bitterly cold. That’s the thing aqbout Europe, they just leave history and natural scenic beauty lying around on the side of the road, instead of packing it up and selling it the way we do here in the Colonies.

I mean, just look at this! Even the town streets are ridiculously scenic. Treacherous to drive, yes, but scenic.

After the wedding, we found a lovely old church.

Our last day, we’d planned to visit Paxton’s Tower, because, hey, you can’t visit a foreign country with a faux-castle nearby and not go.

A ferocious squall swept in on our last night, bringing rain and such fog as can scarcely be imagined by human intellect…

…but we made the trek anyway.

There’s remarkably little to see there—it is literally only a model—but from the foot of the tower, the landscape is breathtaking. You can see the Emyn Muil across the Dead Marshes almost to the great gates of Mordor themselves!

Some Thoughts on Consent and the Right to Say Meh

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My Talespinner and I are just putting the finishing touches on a book we co-authored together with her other boyfriend, an anthology of supernatural erotica called Spectres.

This isn’t actually an essay about that, it’s an essay about consent, agency, and the right to say meh. Hang on, I’m getting there.

One of the stories (actually more of a novella; Spectres is a chonky book) centers on an archaeologist working at a dig site in Türkiye who unearths a Hittite artifact that, spoiler, contains the soul of a priestess of Šauška, the Hittite goddess of sex and healing. Shenanigans happen, she seduces a grad student named Sarah, they start a weird D/s relationship, and near the end of the story it’s implied that she may offer Sarah’s sexual favors to another of her lovers…something Sarah consents to.

I will have ARCs soon. Hit me up if you want a copy!

So. A few days ago I saw a post on social media to the extent of “Remember, if the consent is not enthusiastic, it’s rape.” And, of course, that post had the usual performative affirmations: upvotes, replies like “Yes! This!” and “Right!”

It kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Not just the performative virtue-signaling aspect of the responses, but the post itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I get where it’s coming from. If you wheedle, beg, pressure, coerce, whine, cajole, browbeat, bulldoze, blandish, exhort, compel, or otherwise arm-twist someone into shagging you, that’s not really consent. Consent, to be valid, must be free, informed, and uncoerced.

But here’s the thing:

Consent can be unenthusiastic without being coerced.

We like to draw hard lines. We like to put everything and everyone in neat, tidy boxes. But real life is messy and chaotic and it sometimes requires thought and judgment rather than platitudes and rules.

I’ve consented to sex unenthusiastically. I’ve agreed to do things I don’t particularly enjoy, because my lovers really really wanted to do them. That isn’t rape.

Yes, I know, I know, the person who posted on social media was (probably) trying, in a clumsy way, to say that sex without uncoerced consent is rape. And that’s true, but it’s not what she said.

Look, I get it. Enthusiastic sex between participants who are really into it is good. But you know what? There are times when one person is more into it than another, and that’s okay.

I have the right to say yes even to things I’m not overjoyed about.

I’m not a masochist. I don’t enjoy pain. I do enjoy making my lovers happy, and so I have freely, without coercion, consented to be spanked, cropped, caned, have needles stuck in me, and bottom for knife play. My body, my choice…and that means I have the right to choose things I’m not really into for the sake of a lover who is.

I am not, and I know there will probably be people who push back on this, but I am not a victim of a sexual assault when I say yes to something that I know in advance is not particularly going to crank my motor. I have the right to say yes to sex I am meh about.

In fact, thad this’ll really bake your noodle, not only do I have the right to say yes to sex I’m meh about, I think that under many circumstances it’s a good thing to do so.

We human beings are terrible at predicting in advance how we will respond to unfamiliar things. I have said yes to sex I was sure I’d enjoy and discovered after the fact that I didn’t like it at all and will never do it again. My consent was not violated.

I’ve said yes to things that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like in order to please a partner, and then discovered that, wow, it really turned me on. My consent was not violated.

Part of having agency means, I believe, having the right to agree to do things I’m not enthusiastic about doing. I may express that thus-and-such isn’t really likely to float my banana, but I can still choose to do it anway.

So. Back to Spectres.

Why would our character agree to have sex with someone she doesn’t want to have sex with and wouldn’t choose as a lover? Because it’s not about him. It’s about her relationship with the protagonist; it’s her way of showing that she is willing to give herself to her lover in that way, by consenting to allow her lover to choose another person for her to have sex with.

I’ve done that in real life, by the way; consented to have sex with someone I wouldnn’t otherwise choose to have sex with because another lover told me to. If you play with D/s, that’s a very powerful form of submission. (And isn’t that what D/s is, for a lot of us? Being willing to do things that another person tells us to do, things we wouldn’t otherwise do, because we’ve chosen to surrender power?)

Look, a lot of folks don’t play this way, and that’s fine. Part of what makes me willing to play this way is the fact that I’m not sexually attracted to people I don’t already have an emotional connection with, so it pushes my buttons in a big way, and that’s where the power, the kick, comes from.

If you don’t understand that, hey, that’s fine. You absolutely don’t need to play that way. The point I’m making here is not that you should run out and do things you don’t want to do because a lover tells you to; the point I’m making here is that it’s absolutely possible to give free, uncoerced consent that is not enthusiastic, to sex you know you’re not likely to enjoy particularly…and that isn’t automatically rape.

The problem with morals that fit conveniently in one Tweet or on a bumper sticker is that people are more complex than bumper-sticker morality. Trying to reduce human ethics to bumper-sticker slogans causes harm.

You personally don’t need to embrace the meh to acknowledge that others can, if they choose.

Dispatches from the Front of Mad Science

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I’ve returned from Wales and London, a trip that turned out to be the absolute embodiment of chaos, from canceled flights and impossible connections to ticket snafus and a wedding in which one of the brides rolled her car into a ditch on her way to the venue (she was fine; the car, less so).

All that plus many pics later. First, whilst visiting my Talespinner I had the opportunity to do a live field test of the Giger-inspired biomechanical nipplesuckers I designed for the alien xenomorph tentacle violation pod, and the trial went quite swimmingly, all things considered.

The nipplesuckers are powerful to the point of being right on the edge of pain, just the thing to add authenticity to an alien violation experience. And of course the mechanical suction never gets tired. Like some kind of unstoppable Nipple Terminator, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are a spent puddle.

The glowing electroluminescent wire turned out to be quite lovely, so we did an entire EL wire bondage photo shoot in Wales, sadly not at a castle (the weather didn’t cooperate) but in the charming little AirBnB we stayed at.

Got a couple outtakes from the nipplesucker test that turned out unexpectedly cool, though!

An Unexpected Journey

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I’m sitting in my Talespinner’s living room, tending to her dogs, who believe with surety and absolute conviction there is something Outside that requires their immediate attention every fifteen minutes or so. The fact that they’ve been wrong about this three times in a row now does not in the slightest deter theri certainty that this time will be different. She (my Talespinnter) is at work, where she will be until ten o’clock tonight.

I flew in from Portland, after an entire day of travel. When I left, it was suny and 40 degrees; I connected in Huoston, where it was dark and in the 70s, and arrived late last night.

A week from today, she and I fly together to London before traveling on with much of the extended polycule to Wales.

This wasn’t the trip we had planned.

We’d planned for me to fly to Springfield in late November, when she’d be able to take some time off work, rent a cozy little cabin she found in a remote corner of Missouri, and isolate ourselves from the outside world to work on the third draft of our novel spin, a sprawling far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel that is, in structure and narrative, the most ambitious, challenging, difficult writing project I’ve ever been part of.

Life got in the way.

We’re flying to London and then on to Wales because a person in our extended polycule, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received devastating medical news. Almost the entire polycule dropped what it was doing to go out there to support her.

I would not have been able to make the trip on such short notice without help from the rest of the extended network, and the unexpected generosity of complete strangers on the Internet, for which I am incredibly grateful.

The situation is unimaginably shitty, yet I am deeply, profoundly thankful to be part of such an amazing, supportive, generous, resilient, healthy, vibrant polycule.

If there is one lesson I could go back in time to give my younger self, it would be…well, it would be buy Bitcoin when it was still 25 cents. But if there were another, it would be this:

Franklin, there’s a word for what you are. That word doesn’t exist yet, but it’s “polyamorous,” and it means “loving many.” You aren’t alone in this, and you don’t need to settle. There are others like Find them. And if ever it should come to pass that a person you love tells you that you must break up with another person you love, or that they refuse to be around your other partners, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever say yes. It is, in fact, possible to be part of an extended network of people who genuinely support each other, and don’t play those kinds of games.

Is It Graft or Is It Cruelty?

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A few years back, I dropped a kettle of boiling water on my foot. The burns sent me to the ER, where I was given a shot of morphine, and then to the burn clinic, where I was prescribed oxycodone. (I have pictures of the burn. They’re not pretty.)

The morphine was awful. I could feel it coming on, like an unpleasant prickly hot surge that passed over my body in a wave. It was a bit like…it’s hard to describe, but imagine being cocooned in a malfunctioning electric blanket that keeps shocking you—a sense of flushed warmth accompanied by extremely unpleasant little zaps like touching a badly grounded electrical appliance with an intermittent short.

Then came the vomiting: vigorous, profuse, and enthusiastic, as if my body, not content with throwing up in a more pedestrian fashion, had decided to twist the spacetime continuum to expel food I hadn’t even eaten yet.

What didn’t happen was pain relief. At all. I was still in exactly as much agony as I was before the shot (and believe me, boiling water burns are awful, the only pain I’ve ever experienced worse than kidney stones).

The oxycodone? Same deal. Spectacularly, implausibly vigorous vomiting, fuckall pain relief.

Finally, in desperation, I tried a cannabis edible, and lo, it was as if a chorus of angels did sing, saying, “let this man’s pain be erased.” It also made me high, which was unpleasant, but every silver lining has a cloud around it, amirite?

Quite a bit of systematic experimentation later, I learned that the sweet spot for pain management for me is 2.5mg of THC and 2.5mg of CBD. That dosage is effective at pain management without leaving me incapable of functioning or unpleasantly high.

I’m probably unusual in that regard. I can definitely feel 1mg of THC. 2.5mg leaves me a little high, but it’s tolerable. 5mg of THC leaves me high AF and not in a good way. 10mg of THC, the one time I tried it, left me curled up on my side hallucinating vigorously.

I use it when ibuprofen doesn’t work, which isn’t very often. This:

is about a three-year supply for me; I cut the gummies into quarters and take a quarter if nothing else works.

I was able to try cannabis edibles thanks to a senator named Mitch McConnell, known to his friends as “that sour old turtle-faced motherfucker,” who in 2018 introduced legislation into an appropriations bill legalizing hemp.

Senator McConnell in an undated Senate photo

Fast forward to 2025, when a senator named Mitch McConnell, known to his friends as “that sour old turtle-faced motherfucker,” has introduced language into an appropriations bill that would ban hemp products across the board.

Now, we’ve all known for many years that Old Turtle-Face has no integrity, shame, scruples, or backbone. This is not new.

What’s new is that his motivations, usually as transparent as the film wrap over a styrofoam tray of ground meat at a discount supermarket, are completely opaque.

When he first said yay to hemp, before his about-face flip-flop, he raved on and on about how it would help Kentucky farmers…farmers he’s now shot, stabbed, and tossed under a bus.

My take on that is someone with a financial interest in cannabis farming offered him a lot of money, then somehow the deal soured.

My Talespinner disagrees. She deals with chronic pain and, like me, has found cannabis a godsend for pain management…only to have it yanked away, leaving few options between, you know, addictive opioids and over-the-counter pain relievers. Her take: it’s intentional, calculated cruelty. Turtleface gets off on it.

And the thing is, either of those two explanations—political crony corruption or deliberate, calculated cruelty—fits. They’re both within Senator Turtledick’s wheelhouse. They both fit his pattern of observed behavior; the man has never met corruption he doesn’t embrace or pointless sadism he doesn’t indulge. He’s basically a walking encyclopedia of the worst impulses of humanity, a case study in unscrupulous, dishonorable barbarism.

So what say you? Is it merely greed, or is he letting slip is inner spite?

I am tired of that man

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My metamour, my girlfriend’s girlfriend, has received some absolutely devastating medical news.

The entire polycule has done an absolutely amazing job of stepping up to support her. In two weeks, I leave for Springfield, where I will join my Talespinner to fly out to London and from there travel to Wales to be with her. The extended polycule did an amazing job of pulling this together in a very short time, and supporting each other to make it happen. My metamours and meta-metamours who were able to even helped the rest of us financially so that we could make arrangements to fly out last minute.

Even complete strangers helped. I would not have been able to go without the kindness of people on social media who offered financial support, completely unasked and unexpected. I am overwhelmed grateful beyond measure for the kindness of people I don’t even know who contributed out of the blue to make this happen.

Thanks to the government shutdown, the FAA is reducing flights at many airports, including PDX. It’s not clear yet whether or not my flight will be one of the ones cut, or what will happen if it is.

United Airlines has offered no-questions-asked refunds on flights ahead of the FAA cuts in air travel…but because international travel isn’t affected by the mandated cuts, they’re only offering me a refund on my domestic flight. I have tickets from Portland to Springfield, then Springfield to London and back, then Springfield to Portland, and right now it’s completely up in the air when (or even if) I will be able to get to Springfield.

I am so goddamn tired of this.

I’m tired of him.

I’m tired of the pettiness. I’m tired of the meanness. I’m tired of the grift, the selfishness, the pointless purposeless malice. I’m tired of his followers, so eager to hurt themselves as long as the people they hate are hurt more.

I’m tired of trying to have empathy for people who are sobbing that they’re losing their jobs or ther farms because he isn’t hurting the people they think he should be hurting. They voted for the leopard and now they’re shocked their faces are being eaten, too.

The stupidity, the venality, the cruelty, the mendacity, the sadistic malignity, I am just so absolutely sick of all of it.

One day, this will end.

Some thoughts on information in the Information Age

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My dad called me yesterday. He received an invoice in an email for $899 for something he didn’t remember ever ordering, and it upset him pretty badly. Fortunately, I’ve worked very hard over the years to educate him about scams, so he calls me before he does anything like call a number or click a link.

The invoice he described was basically identical to one I received a few days ago myself:

These scams are incredibly common right now; I’m getting about 4-6 a month. The scam is the “customer support” number I circled.

The mark calls that number and is greeted by a kind, helpful, polite voice on the other end who says “yes, I’m very sorry, sir, I will take care of it right now, sir, please give me your name and credit card number, sir, and I will be happy to reverse the charges. Oh, was this a PayPal invoice? Okay, can you give me your PayPal name? Yes, sir, perfect, I’ll need your PayPal password too, please…and do you have a passcode on this PayPal account, sir? Yes, yes, thank you, sir, now, do you have a bank account linked to your PayPal? Oh, you do? Can you give me that account number and routing number, sir? Okay, yes, got it, I’ll reverse the charge immediately, sir.”

$$$cha-CHING!$$$

But I didn’t come here to talk about Internet scams. I came here to talk about design, and specifically, how entire generations of people were raised to be gullible and easy to scam, all because of design.

In ages past (like when I first started in the design world), design was hard. Making a simple letterhead was hard.

A company would go to a graphic design studio. They’d bring a copy of their logo as either a camera-ready slick or a square piece of negative film.

A designer would typeset the letterhead using a phototypesetting machine, then output it to a sheet of photographic film. Then, using an XActo knife and a light table, the designer would cut rubylith and use it to burn the letterhead and logo together onto another sheet of film, which would then be used to burn a printing plate for a press.

This was difficult, expensive, and highly skilled work. When I started working prepress professionally, the building I worked in had an entire huge film stripper’s room where people spent their workday sitting at enormous glass light tables, XActo knives in hand, surrounded by sheets of film and rolls of rubylith, doing this work.

Design was hard.

Because design was hard, only large, well-heeled companies could afford good design. Shady fly-by-night scam businesses were largely locked out of the world of design, which is why scam ads in the 70s, 80s, and 90s tended to have that cheap, low-quality “look” about them.

Good design became a proxy for reliability, for legitimacy, for dependability. Only legitimate companies could afford it, which means generations of people, including the Boomers and those of us on the leading edge of Gen X, ended up trained to associate design with a company’s legitimacy and trustworthiness.

Scammers could never afford something like this.

Enter the era of desktop publishing.

I was in on the ground floor. Desktop publishing revolutionized design and prepress. I was working in the industry during the transition from light tables and rubylith to QuarkXPress and Photoshop, and I cannot overstate how much DTP democratized design. I helped publish small-press ’zines in the 90s and early 2000s, something that was all but impossible to do with any quality before the 90s.

Suddenly, design that would’ve been out of reach to anyone but Fortune 1000 businesses became possible for two dudes right out of uni working from an apartment. (In fact, that’s why my website at xeromag.com exists; it started as the site for a small press magazine called Xero.)

This is unquestionably a good thing…but just as it empowered small-press ’zine communities and business owners, it empowered scammers.

Suddenly scammers could create official-looking business stationery, logos, websites, ads, fake invoices, fake receipts, all completely effortlessly.

I talked to a person online a few weeks back who’d fallen for a pig butchering scam—a fake Bitcoin scheme where marks are lured to “invest” in what seems like legitimate Bitcoin sites, only to have their money stolen. “But the site looked so official!” she said. “It even had graphs and charts of real-time Bitcoin prices and everything!”

I’ve heard that countless times before. “But the site looked perfect! How was I supposed to know it wasn’t really PayPal?” “But it looked like a real bank site!”

You can buy templates for websites that look like anything you want. With a two-minute search, I found a pre-created template for a Bitcoin trading platform that included real-time feeds of Bitcoin prices, login, activity tracking, fake account generation, the whole nine, for $39.

You can, with a few clicks of a mouse, use online tools to have fake letterhead and business cards made, then with a few more clicks ship it off to production.

The point here is, design is no longer a proxy for legitimacy. You can no longer measure something’s validity by how it looks.

But millions of people, mostly Boomers and Gen Xers, haven’t got the memo.

The sudden revolution in design created an exploit in the minds of a large number of people indeed, a way to slip past their defenses to take advantage of them with scams.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. I do know that a lot of people base their judgment on something’s legitimacy on how “official” it looks, and nowadays that veneer of legitimacy is available to everyone.

When people get taken by scams, it’s not necessarily that they’re stupid. Sometimes, it’s that they’re using markers for scams that no longer exist, because the world changed in the blink of an eye and the cues that once separated scammers from legitimate enterprises no longer exist.

We live in a world surrounded by design. Design is both invisible and essential, so when the design world changes, it can have weird knock-on effects nobody ever imagined.