After a Romance Scam: I Don't Want Fear of Scams to Stop Me from Understanding the World

On the morning of the interview, Hsiao-Wen walked into the room with a strong, confident voice. She came across as independent and intelligent. Although in her fifties, she was energetic and spoke passionately with us about social and international issues she followed online-quite different from the image I had imagined of someone who might fall victim to a romance scam.

Hsiao-Wen studied business and, after graduation, worked in import-export trade, frequently corresponding with overseas clients in foreign languages. To improve her language skills, she also attended a language school in Canada, where she encountered cultures from around the world and made friends of many nationalities. Perhaps because of this background, together with her interest in political and social issues, she often followed public affairs online and actively expressed her views. During Thailand's 2020 student protests, Hsiao-Wen, who was voicing support for the Thai students online, received a direct message from a Nigerian man. They discovered that they shared similar ideals and values, enjoyed talking with one another, and grew closer. In addition to exchanging aspects of their cultures, the man seriously studied Chinese for Hsiao-Wen. His attentive companionship became an important source of support and comfort while she was having difficulties at work.

"I don't want fear of scams to stop me from understanding the world," Hsiao-Wen said. In her fifties and with considerable life experience, she was not entirely without caution. But the man appeared sincere: he video-called her, and after they had spoken for several months, he-who had previously been married and had children-even discussed his children's future with her and made plans for them to live together. At one point, he said the pandemic had affected his livelihood and asked to borrow money. Thinking of him as someone trying to make a life far from home and, as a Black man, vulnerable to discrimination, the warm-hearted Hsiao-Wen could not bring herself to ignore his predicament. Telling herself that if she was deceived she would simply have to accept the loss, she wired him more than NT$60,000 in Malaysia. He did not disappear after receiving the money, which only deepened her trust in the man on the other side of the screen.

"My account has been flagged. I want to know what happened."

After the pandemic led Malaysia to impose a lockdown, Hsiao-Wen mailed the debit card for a bank account she rarely used to the man so he could make withdrawals, hoping to avoid exchange-rate losses and difficulties caused by bank closures. The man later asked to use her account for Bitcoin investments.

Because there was little money in the account, Hsiao-Wen initially did not think much of it. Then one day she noticed several deposits, all transferred from banks in Taiwan, which did not match the overseas investment returns she had expected. She began to sense that something was wrong. A few weeks later, the bank notified her that the account had been designated a warning account, leaving her unable to receive her salary. Desperate to understand what had happened, she went from police station to police station seeking answers, but because the police could not accept a report from her, she was unable to learn what was going on.

Two months later, after one of the people who had been defrauded reported the matter to police, Hsiao-Wen learned that she herself had become a defendant: the account she had lent out had been used as a dummy account by a fraud ring.

A Secret She Could Not Bring Herself to Tell

Becoming a defendant upended Hsiao-Wen's life. Because her salary could no longer be deposited, coworkers heard about the fraud case and inevitably discussed it in private. At home, her family did not understand what had happened. She was afraid to go out and anxiously watched the mailbox each day, worried that her parents would discover another registered letter from the prosecutors office. Eventually, the frequent need to appear in court, combined with physical and emotional exhaustion, forced her to leave her job.

One fortunate circumstance was that, when Hsiao-Wen first lent the man money, she had also mailed daily necessities for his children to Malaysia. Those items later became key evidence supporting a decision not to prosecute her. Although she was cleared in the first case, four other investigations remained pending, so her account was still frozen. A year after leaving her previous job, she still had not been able to return to work. Because she had to attend hearings, she could consider only jobs with flexible hours; she would also have to explain the history of the warning account to a new employer and disclose that she had been scammed, which imposed an enormous psychological burden. Hsiao-Wen felt ashamed of having fallen victim to a romance scam, and the ordeals she had endured became a painful secret she found difficult to share with those around her.

What She Lost Was Not Money, but Someone's Companionship

"My mom called me stupid and asked how I could have been scammed. But to me, he wasn't a stranger." At the very beginning of the interview, Hsiao-Wen choked up before she could finish her first sentence about what had happened. When she first noticed unusual activity in her account, the man told her that he too was a victim and, despite being overseas, even offered to join her by video call while she went to the police station to explain. It was not until other cases began to emerge that Hsiao-Wen realized he was a fraudster.

Because I knew before the interview that Hsiao-Wen had been a victim of a romance scam, the man in her story was, to me, simply a fraudster. Only when I saw how deeply she was hurt did I fully realize that, for Hsiao-Wen, even if he was suspected of fraud, this was also a very real heartbreak. She had lost someone who had once been intimately present in her life-the one person she could confide in when she was struggling. Compared with the financial loss and the burden of dealing with the justice system, the emotional blow may have been the greatest harm of all.

In the phrase "romance scam," "romance" merely describes the type; the core of the term is still "scam." I have always felt that the label is too blunt. Once it is applied, the person who was hurt in the relationship disappears behind a stigma: someone who misjudged another person and was fooled. Before the interview, Hsiao-Wen spoke about the loneliness of seeing friends marry and build families while she, with her interest in public affairs, often had little in common to discuss with coworkers. To me, Hsiao-Wen is someone with passion for life and aspirations of her own. It was because she retained a certain idealism that she was willing to believe in a distant man who seemed to share her values; and because she was kind-hearted, she was willing to help a friend she believed was in difficulty.

People like Hsiao-Wen who are deceived and end up becoming dummy-account holders often find themselves at a disadvantage during investigation and prosecution, and many are eventually indicted. Hsiao-Wen was among the relatively fortunate ones: she happened to have key evidence that persuaded the prosecutor and allowed her to clear her name. Even so, she still has unresolved cases, still cannot use her account, and still cannot return to her former life. The pain experienced by people in this situation is often made harder to express by others' suspicion, contempt, and lack of understanding. Does being a "defendant in a fraud case" really mean a person deserves universal condemnation? Beyond the fragmentary descriptions in a case file, can we also try to see more of the stories and experiences of the people called "defendants"?