Il bisogno affettivo e l’inganno dei social: i presupposti e le pratiche del Romance Scam

In today's society, love becomes an escape from loneliness and an object of digital relationships that often seem to replace “human” relationships in an already very complex sentimental dynamic, but even more complex after the experience of SARS-CoV-2. Such “emotional sensitivity” (Condorelli, 2021) is part of the broader, current, and renewed debate on the affective bond of the love type that, from the individual space with tangible characteristics, is manifested on the stage of online estimity (Tisseron, 2011; Stanton et al., 2016). Indeed, according to the Postal Police in 2021, there was +118% of sentimental scams in Italy (Polizia Postale, 2022). In particular, among these dangers, there is the Romance Scam (Love Scam or also known as sweetheart swindles), as to say a criminal practice in which a user is lured by scammers who use a fake or stolen identity on social networks in order to extort, scam or blackmail the victim who believes they are experiencing a real love relationship (Whitty, 2015; 2018; Carter, 2021; Cassandra, Lee, 2022; Suleman et al., 2023). Therefore, the essay aims to reflect on the online dynamic from a socio-criminological point of view, starting from the theories to arriving at the most recent and current implications of the phenomenon with particular attention to the underlying and emerging emotional dynamics.