by
Guest Contributor
July 10, 2025
And then came the pit in my stomach — the one you feel when you realize something has gone horribly wrong and there’s no way to rewind.
People think the worst part of being scammed is the financial loss. But what no one warns you about is the shame that comes with it. You should’ve known better. How could you fall for that?
But here’s the thing: shame doesn’t just make you feel bad, it makes you stay quiet, but we need to start talking about these things in order to address them.
If someone told you they were mugged on the street, you wouldn’t respond by questioning their intelligence. You wouldn’t say, “How could you be so dumb?”
But with online scams, that’s often the first reaction. When I finally told my parents, they were stunned. “If you, someone who works at a digital privacy company, didn't catch it, who would?”
What makes online scams unique is that your attacker is invisible. There’s no crowd to validate your pain, nor an obvious villain to point to, and no sympathetic bystander to say, “That wasn’t your fault.”
The more I reflected, the more I realized that scammers succeed because they know how to bypass vigilance. They activate a different part of our brain — one driven by instinct, emotion, or belief — and in that moment, intention takes over caution. Sometimes they target the identities we’re proud of: the helpful employee, the good friend, the responsible citizen. I wanted the message to be real because I wanted to be the kind of person my “boss” could rely on. That was the hook.
Other times, they prey on our aspirations. That’s why so many people fall for investment scams or too-good-too-be-true offers. It’s not out of greed but the belief that we’re making a smart choice or simply seizing an opportunity.
Add a moment of stress, distraction, or urgency, and your brain does what it’s designed to do: it trusts what feels familiar. That familiarity also lends itself to the platforms these scammers use: an iMessage, a Venmo request, a “Hi, it’s me” text that sounds like it’s from someone you know. That’s what makes scams work.
In the aftermath, guilt felt like a form of control. If it was my fault, maybe I could fix it. Shame made me question who I was. And self-blame tied it all together, convincing me I was the only one responsible.
But the truth is, when we carry all the blame, we let everything else off the hook. We don't question why systems are so easy to exploit, why platforms don’t do more, or why victims feel like they have to hide. Besides hurting us, silence protects the people and systems that failed us. And in that gap, scammers keep winning.
Falling for a scam doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you human. It means you trusted, you wanted to help, you believed the world would behave the way it was supposed to. And that instinct, to do the right thing, is still something to be proud of.
But let’s stop protecting scammers with our silence. Let’s talk about it.
