Why Intelligence Does Not Protect You

The belief that does the damage

Almost everybody believes this could not happen to them. That belief is the single most useful thing an operator has, because a person who is certain they would notice does not tell anyone about the new person in their life, and telling someone is the defence that works.

What the evidence actually says

The largest study of its kind surveyed nearly twelve thousand people in the UK and compared two hundred romance-fraud victims against everyone else. The profile that came back was not the one in the newspapers.

Victims were middle-aged and well educated. Sixty-three per cent were between thirty-five and fifty-four; only sixteen per cent were over fifty-five. And education did not protect anybody: in the model, having more of it was associated with *higher* odds of being a victim, not lower.

That last finding is worth sitting with. It is not a quirk of one dataset. A long fraud is a persuasion problem, and the skills that make somebody good at their job — reading people, following an argument, trusting a coherent story — are the same skills being used against them.

Why the stereotype survives anyway

Because loss and frequency are different measurements. Older victims lose far more money each, so they dominate the totals published by fraud agencies, while being a minority of the people it happens to. Read one figure and you conclude this is a problem for the elderly. Read both and you conclude it is a problem for adults.

What actually varies

Not intelligence. Circumstance. Bereavement, divorce, a move to a new city, retirement, illness in the family, a period of working away. Every one of these produces a person who is reachable, and every one of them happens to competent people on an ordinary schedule.

The useful question is therefore never "am I the sort of person this happens to". It is "am I currently in the sort of period when it happens".