Nigel Latta on the psychology of online scams and why it’s so easy to be fleeced
Nigel Latta: “People think banks can get their money back. They often can’t.” Photo / Supplied
Simon is not a good guy. He sounds like he is over the phone, with his slightly posh English accent and his relaxed and reassuring tone, but he’s not. He’s likely in his early 30s, from a middle-class home, I’d imagine, and he almost certainly has worked in the finance sector at some point, because he has the practised patter of someone who knows the territory pretty well.
He’s telling me about interest rates for term deposits and they’re pretty good. Not so good to arouse immediate suspicion but good enough to get people’s attention. Good, but not obviously too good to be true.
I can imagine what he’s like in his real life: arrogant, unkind, callous, but not in an immediately apparent way. He’ll go out for drinks with his similarly unpleasant friends and they’ll make a lot of noise and no doubt drink flashy champagne and treat the waiters badly.
He probably fancies himself as a player, but he’s not. He’s just a bad man who steals people’s money.
Simon is obviously not his real name. He’s impersonating a real person from the actual bank he claims to be from. We found scammer Simon by googling “Term deposits New Zealand”, and the website he’s connected to came up in the first five search results. He’s likely scammed dozens of people in New Zealand in the past year. I spoke with a woman who lost $100,000 to Simon. She’s smart and she worked hard to try to verify he was legit, and still she got scammed. It was her life savings.
How much has Simon made from Kiwis alone? Probably millions. Yep, that’s right: millions.
Steal our stuff
When we set out to make a TV series about the psychology of scams, I was quite unprepared for what we’d find. It is, without doubt, one of the most sobering pieces of television I’ve made, and it’s also changed my personal behaviour online more than any other series I’ve worked on.
How prolific are scams? They are everywhere. And they are growing in scale and in complexity. How they work is pretty simple: they hijack basic human traits and use them against us ‒ traits like confidence, trust, complacency, love, optimism and fear.
All scams rely on us to do something. We have to click on a link or enter credit card details or transfer money or give away our personal information. This isn’t something the scammer can do to us; they have to do it with us. They co-opt us into the scam so that we willingly provide them with the means to steal our stuff.
We’re all vulnerable
You might think you’d never fall for a scam, but that very confidence can be your undoing. While making the series, I spoke with lots of smart people who once upon a time thought that very same thing.