Recently, a friend of mine changed her Facebook profile picture from something abstract to a really pretty picture of herself. I complimented the change, and then sat back and watched the bots descend.
(The screenshot above is what landed in her inbox within 24 hours. She'd been using an avatar for years. Now you know why.)
What the research says
Here's the thing about the beauty industry: it has spent decades and billions of dollars convincing people — women, specifically — that they are not enough. And one measurable side effect of all that damage? When a woman changes her profile picture to show her actual face, algorithms and scammers alike read it as a signal. She's feeling herself today. She might be lonely. She might be vulnerable.
There have been quite a few studies on this. And bad actors have clearly done their homework, because romance scams are specifically engineered to show up in that moment.
What I say
This newsletter is about cybersecurity, not psychology, so I'm going to spare you the full spiral on influencer culture and the attention economy. TL;DR: they make money by damaging you, and are to be avoided at all costs.
What I will say, from a human-centered cybersecurity perspective, is this: there is an entire industry that has figured out how to monetize human pain — and built automated tools to scale it. I have thoughts about that. None of them are printable.
What can you do?
Glad you asked. Here's how to fight back:
Reach out publicly. Comment directly on the thread with a link to this article. Roaches, meet sunlight.
Check in privately. Make sure the person being targeted knows this is a scam — not a compliment, not a coincidence.
Block and report. Will the platform do anything? Probably not. Will it feel satisfying? Genuinely, yes. Do it anyway.
Clean your data footprint. This one matters more than people realize. Scammers can follow you across platforms — if they can find you. Make it hard. You can use DeleteMe (affiliate link), or DIY it with the epic Big-Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List — created and maintained by the amazing Yael Grauer. Seriously. Clean your data footprint.
A final thought
Scams target people who are alone or lonely. That's not an accident — that's the business model.
And it's something we can actually fight, directly, in the real world. Compliment people. Build people up. Remind them they're not invisible. Speak up, in every space you're in, about what it looks like when capitalism profits off of human misery.
Maybe even log off and go be with actual humans in 3D space? Radical, I know. But it just might work.
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