14 Aug 2024 - AJ
After many, many drafts the original mid-week blog post just… didn’t happen because I realized that it was far more complex than could be covered easily in one blog post. At some point in the future I’ll come back to it. So instead, I’d like to talk about how to step back and think rationally when you’ve come across a potential scam.
Reason is the enemy of scammers; they don’t like it when you use your brain. They make it as difficult as possible. This is not something that’s limited to scammers alone as advertisers do something similar - except they usually at least give you some kind of useful product in return.
One of the biggest things that scammers use is manipulating your emotions. Fear and shame are the most common emotions they use, but so is greed, and let’s not forget the ones that use the human desires to connect, fall in love, and just be helpful that they’ll gleefully manipulate as well. I’ve learned to step back and evaluate my emotions, and it’s something that you can do as well.
The techniques I’m outlining here are tools I’ve picked up from therapy sessions over the years. They’re meant to help people pause and see things more realistically - to break them out of mindsets that their own brains trap them in. I’ve found they’re equally useful for being able to get in the frame of mind to think critically about scams, especially if you’re being hit by strong negative emotions like fear or shame.
1) If it’s a phone call, hang up and put your phone on do not disturb. (If you are for some reason still on a landline, take your phone off the hook.) If it’s a text message, an email, or similar, put it aside. If the scammer is in front of you, it’s a bit harder but walking away is always a good option, and get to a populated space if you feel threatened. Distance yourself so that the thing provoking that emotional response is not in front of you.
2) Breathe. No, this is not useless advice. A common physiological response to fear is shallow breathing, and you need to get oxygen into you. In addition, concentrating on a breathing exercise can force you to move your attention away from your spiralling thoughts. The simplest to remember for me is box breathing - breathe in for a count of four, hold your breath for a count of four, exhale for a count of four, hold your breath again. If you can’t concentrate on a count, there are plenty of videos on this technique that will help you count. Keep doing this until you feel at least a bit better - you’ll need at least a minute and probably more.
3) Name the emotion you’re feeling. This may be more than one and you can name them all, but you’ll probably be feeling one emotion the strongest. Concentrate on that one.
4) Identify the thought that is associated with the emotion. For example, if you are presented with a fake arrest scam, you might be thinking something like “I’m gonna get arrested and then everybody’s gonna know and then I’m never gonna get a job and my life is over and and and!”
5) Acknowledge that this thought is happening and that it’s causing you to feel a very powerful emotion that’s making it hard to concentrate on anything else.
6) Tell yourself that you need to be certain this is/isn’t true and you need to do some factfinding.
After all this, you should be able to be in a frame of mind that will allow you to look at things a bit more clearly and critically. That’s where you question about whether something’s too good to be true, whether someone actually sent that message, if something that would really happen, and so on. Then you can take action - most likely block/ignore/delete. If you’ve fallen victim, take more deep breaths, realize that you are only human and these people are really good at manipulation, and go on from there.
(Curious about the techniques I’m using? Well, box breathing I explained above. Steps 3, 4, and 6 are primarily adapted from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT); I’m subbing in a bit of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for step 5 as the equivalent step in CBT is identifying a cognitive distortion - that is, the way one’s thoughts have gone awry - which is… not as much use for this situation. But the general gist of what I learned in CBT - identify the emotion/thought/distortion, factfind, re-evaluate your emotion/thought based on that factfinding - works very well for countering emotional manipulation as well.)