Love on the Line: How to Recover from Romance Scams Gracefully and Without Victimisation Extended and Re-edited

By Elina Juusola

How can you become a victim of a romance scam and recover from the experience without harm? Elina Juusola, researcher and a feminist was living a low time of her life. She was struggling with her health and grieving the loss of her mother when she suddenly was cheered by a suggestion on Facebook to join a dating site. Soon, she was receiving mai

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Apr 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643673530

Elina Juusola

Elina Juusola has travelled the world extensively. She studied Humanities in Sweden, and later, at a mature age, went back to study in Australia for her Business degree in Philanthropy. She was privileged to be one of the founding members of the Swedish Women’s Studies Seminars and has been active in the grass-roots level of the Women’s Movement. Her ambition is to be the best grandmother there is. She devotes her spare time to writing and researching burning world issues. Her secret hobbies are upcycling tin cans to art and playing Lego with grandkids.

Book preview

Love on the Line

Copyright © 2019 by Elina Juusola. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of URLink Print and Media.

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Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64367-354-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64367-353-0 (Digital)

1. Memoir

2. Self-Help

10.04.19

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: My Story

Chapter 3: The World through My Eyes

Chapter 4: How are the Sex, Romance Book reading, and Pornography Industries Connected with the Romance Scams Industry?

Chapter 5: How to Recognise Your Belief System

Chapter 6: What to Know about the Chemistry of Love and Arousal

Chapter 7: How to Use the Theory of Turning Emotion to Money and Develop a Perfect Pitch for Love for Scamming, Romance, and Pornography Industry Business

Chapter 8: Why are Mature People More Vulnerable to Scamming?

Chapter 9: Scammers 101: Unveiled

Chapter 10: Thinking about Recovery through Transformative Thinking

Chapter 11: Love Online: The Fairy Tale

Chapter 12: Discussion on the Possibility of Alternative Storylines through Social Change

Chapter 13: Love Online: The Alternative Short Story

Chapter 14: Concluding the Journey and Moving on with Life

Chapter 15: Tips for the Future Avoidance of Becoming a Victim of Fraud

APPENDIX: The Journey from Pioneer to Pathfinder

NOTES AND REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION

For the last 27 years we have observed the growth in cybercrimes from the days of CompuServe and America Online to today’s trillion-dollar worldwide industry. Scams in all their forms have become a constant drain on society - a kind of Internet tax that siphons vast amounts of money from the global economy into a universe of criminal cartels not so different than that of drug trafficking. However, what is frequently overlooked is the cost in human lives—the victims of cybercrime.

Some cybercrimes have little impact on individual personal lives, a virus rarely affects someone personally other than a denial of access to their computers and technology, but some cybercrimes so profoundly impact their victims as to cause life-changing trauma that for many even leads to their death. This is the realm of online scams that do more than just collect vast amounts of money, they leave personal devastation in their wake.

As the Chairman of the major worldwide nonprofit nongovernmental organization that is focused on addressing both the criminality of online scams and the traumatized victims they leave behind, I am only too aware of the horrific effect on people’s lives, families, and futures. Our organization hears every day in the voices of their victims how great the cost is of scams, such as romance scams, that pull their victims into a web of deep psychological manipulation and emotional destruction equal to that done to any battered spouse.

Our culture has barely begun to recognize the emotional cost and recovery challenges for these victims. Society’s recognition of romance scam victims’ trauma is at a stage similar to where awareness of sexual abuse trauma was 30 years ago. However, tremendous progress is being made by our organization, governments around the world, and recognized global scholars such as Elina Juusola.

We are immensely proud to count Elina Juusola as not only a founding-member of our organization, but also a member of our Board of Advisors for the work that she has done in both transforming her personal experience in these multi-national social engineering scams that profoundly affected her personally, but also for the ground breaking work she has done in helping develop models to directly help scam victims that we apply in our daily support of scam victims.

Juusola’s work has benefitted countless romance scam victims around the world directly through her own face to face field work is supporting victims, but also in helping our organization to build better scam victims’ assistance & support programs that have helped thousands of victims around the world. As a Senior Advisor to our organization [SCARS] she has been instrumental in helping us recognize the depth of the trauma victims experience and help us find ways to support victims that have yielded an over 30% success rate in recovery.

This book is not only Elina Juusola’s astounding personal journey, but it is also a declaration of defiance to inspire all victims of romance scams and to show them a path into the light that for so many thought that there was no light left in their lives. This is a watershed work that will be recognized both for the moment in which it emerged but also for setting the tone for our own combined work to turn around the lives of so many tragically affected by these devastating psychologically manipulative crimes. We urge every scam victim to read this book and share it.

October 11, 2018

Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.

Founder & Chairman

Society of Citizens Against Romance Scams [SCARS]

Miami, Florida, U.S.A.

www.AgainstRomanceScams.org

[e-mail]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people and circumstances have contributed to my writing of this book. First and foremost, this book would not have come about without the grass-roots women’s movement I was part of during the last thirty plus years. The freedom of thinking and acting for women and for global peace has contributed to my convictions about the world. These ideas have been grounded in me through my mentors in the women’s movement including, among others, Ingegerd Lundström, Dale Spender, Amy Kaminsky, Berit Ås, Hilkka Pietilä, the late Kari Mattila, Wilma Scott-Heide, Else Barth, and Joan Rothchild.

My heartfelt thanks to wonderful Gloria Orenstein for seeing in my manuscript much more than I did at first and writing the appendix to this book.

I can also thank those who contributed to my theosophical upbringing, especially my late grandfather, Olavi Palo, and my early mentor Joy Mills.

There is a dear friend who has played the crucial part in writing this book. I want to thank Chris Henderson, her Unstoppable Women coaching group, and her Women Howling at the Moon community in Brisbane. Her commitment has restored in me the belief that I am not alone and that there are plenty of women out there taking action in changing the world. Her connections have also contributed to me having a wonderful group of women to rely on for comments. These include Maria Roeckmann and Lani Morris. I want to thank my very good friends Denise Arbabzadah, Salme Durbin, Eeva Gopaul, Glenda Heig, and Sandra Vincent-Gay, who have supported me through the writing process.

I thank the Queensland Police Fraud Prevention and Support Group or their encouragements, especially Angela Tilbrook who, in addition to becoming a friend, kept sending me the most encouraging emails while she read the manuscript.

I want to thank my sons, Hanno and Nillo they live on the other side of the world from me, but our fun conversations and imagined movie scripts about romance scams prompted the whole idea of the book in my head.

Last but not least, I want to thank my daughters, Henna and Nelli for being there for me through the writing process and my wonderful grandchildren, Iida, Hera, Henry, Tessa, Hilla and Olli for restoring in me the spirit of generational exchange and the courage to think that there is a great future in store for humanity despite all the odds.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I could never find anyone as special as you are, Elina. I love you so much.

If you received a text like the above sentence, would you not feel good? Would it not make you smile, just a little, inside your heart? Well, I received one, and it made me smile. It was the parting text from my online love interest—just before I blocked him from all my contacts.

The idea of writing this book came to me because I was scammed by a very professional and seasoned man on the Internet. After innocently filling in a form offered on Facebook for an Internet dating site called Be2, I was contacted by not one but two people, both of whom turned out to be scammers.

The first one fell into the category I was familiar with and had been previously warned about—the person who is pretending to be something they obviously aren’t. In this case, my would-be date was supposedly an Irish-born engineer with a small child, who lived and worked in Texas but who had no English-language skills. The second one wrote in regular English; he even responded to jokes as naturally as he responded to anything else I wrote about. I really thought he was a winner.

In fact, I thought that he was absolutely fantastic—until I started suspecting him to be a scammer. About a month into the affair, he started asking for money. However, by then I had deemed him a genuine and an intelligent guy, so I went along with the first request. When he then supposedly got into more and more trouble, I started doing my research. At the same time, I absolutely loved the attention and was quite reluctant to let the relationship go.

Even though I consider myself to be a fairly smart person, I still fell for it. As I was beginning to wonder if something was amiss, I had several conversations with my friends about Internet dating. I was surprised to learn that most of them had experienced online dating themselves.

These coffee-club talks with friends and acquaintances revealed that many of them had, in fact, been in the same situation as I was. While some had met their partner or lover online, others had also been scammed. Some of them had experienced this many times. What was most astonishing was that they had never really talked about their experiences before. Our conversations revealed that many were still traumatised by the events they described. Most revealed that they were still clearly angry when remembering the incidents. I immediately undertook further study to find ways to help the victims of scams— including myself. The data I was able to collect revealed to me that Internet romance scams are on the rise worldwide.

In 2013, dating and romance scams topped the list of financial scams in Australia. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) figures show that in that year, 2,777 reports for romance fraud were submitted; out of those, 1,189 people lost money—altogether as much as $23 million.1

The figures for losses in the United States and the United Kingdom are even more outrageous. In 2012 in the United States, people reportedly lost nearly $56 million to scammers through romance scams, and in the United Kingdom, the total was £24 million.² I was fascinated by the research that was undertaken at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom about the psychology of online dating. It struck me quite hard.

It stated that in 2012, about 230,000 people in the United Kingdom may have fallen for romance scams. What really affected me was that out of all the participants in this study, none had actually recovered from the effects the scam had on them.³ That finding immediately gave me a reason to start looking for a possible solution. I also searched different media outlets for relevant clues. In particular, Australian ABC and SBS channel documentaries offered the best source for information.

In August 2014 there was a documentary series called Head First introduced by Sabour Bradley on the Australian ABC TV network.⁴ Part one of the first series, about online scammers from Ghana, was called The Social Monster. The episode had an interesting storyline that highlighted the different ways in which scammers manipulate their victims into sending them money despite great difficulties in the victims’ own lives. That particular story had a positive resolution; some of the scammers were caught, thanks to the efforts of the Queensland Police, Sabour Bradley, and the Ghana Police Service working together.

Ghana seems to have a high population of scammers, and while scamming is officially condemned, it is pretty much considered part of the everyday culture of their society. This also applies to other African countries, such as Nigeria. You only need to Google Ghana scam or Nigerian scam, and the descriptions are there for you to read. By the time I had discovered this, I was already making connections in my mind between scamming and pornography and romance books. It finally hit me while I was watching the last program in the second series of Heads First. This episode, The Porn Ultimatum, explored the porn culture online and in the open market. I realised that the phenomenon of scamming falls within the same patterns I was familiar with from researching