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Interview with Svetlana Abakumova.
It is generally accepted that people without critical thinking usually become victims of carders. And also elderly people who are not familiar with typical carding schemes. But that's not true.
Research shows that people with high IQs and education levels are just as likely to fall victim to carding as those who are less intelligent and educated. And a study by the European Commission in 2019, covering almost 30 thousand people in 36 countries, showed that young people under 34 years of age are increasingly falling into the hands of carders.
What cognitive mechanisms make us vulnerable to carding and how to recover if you become a victim of it, says Svetlana Abakumova, a Jungian psychologist and specialist at the Yasno service.
— What kind of people usually commit carding?
— There are many types of carding: some steal data on the Internet, others scam partners found on dating apps, and others engage in corporate espionage. Everyone who commits this is united by a lack of guilt and empathy, an inability to put oneself in the place of another person and empathize with him. Some are outright sadistic, but not all.
Due to a lack of empathy, carders are often attributed low emotional intelligence, but this is also not entirely true. To manipulate other people, you need to have a good understanding of how they feel and think. Therefore, among carders there are also people with highly developed emotional intelligence - which does not prevent them from remaining indifferent or enjoying deceiving others and seeing their suffering. Because empathy and emotional intelligence are not the same thing.
In addition, carders are often gambling and risk-prone: having tried the taste of deception, thus earning money once, they want to repeat it again and again not only for the sake of profit, but also because it is pleasant for them to “play” in this way.
Carders who communicate directly with victims do not hack their profiles, but gain their trust - usually charming, outwardly good-natured, charismatic people, communicating with whom you would never think that they are engaged in this type of activity.
— What features of thinking allow carders not to feel guilty?
— As a rule, these people are deeply traumatized in childhood so that they do not develop a system of basic trust and responsibility, which should arise in the process of upbringing in a favorable environment. For example, a person was bullied at school, and his parents, when he told about it, did not support him, and even humiliated him themselves.
Coldness, indifference, and humiliation on the part of the family easily turn into distrust of the world and embitterment, a desire to punish. Especially if a person is completely immersed in an environment where deception is the norm of social interaction, and in order to survive and feel like a leader, you need to learn to deceive.
As a result, a person believes that one cannot trust, but must be used, and puts use as a priority over other ways of interacting with people. Feelings of conscience and guilt are blocked along with traumatic childhood experiences. The carder believes: “Since they did this to me, then my mission is to rid this world of suckers, to become an orderly for society. If someone is so stupid that they fell for my deception, it is their own fault; their suffering is not my fault.”
— Do victims of carders have anything in common?
— Victims of carders are ordinary people for whom it is important to meet the requirements of society, or even very good people who want to help others. They follow certain social programs. Carders seem to hack this program. For example, there is a program of following authority - and if someone respected and famous said that you need to invest money in a financial pyramid, many will do it.
There is also a program of conformity - imitation of others, a tendency to be like everyone else. If a group of people is looking at the sky, passers-by will start doing so too. Those passing by also began to stop and look at the sky. So if a certain part of well-known investors began to invest in a certain startup, other investors will also want to invest money.
In addition, there is a mutual aid program. The entire human civilization is built on the need to help each other and do something together, since being an altruist is beneficial: this way you can divide the work and increase the chances that they will help you later. And this is another common bait that carders use to lure victims. Standard scheme: a person at the station comes up upset and says that he has lost all his things and has no money for the trip home - and they give him money to buy a ticket.
— What cognitive mechanisms do carders exploit to make them believe them?
— The first is the belief that you are smart, know the schemes of carders and cannot be deceived. It's an illusion. For example, the case of University of Colorado psychiatry professor Stephen Greenspan is well known. He wrote a book, The Annals of Credibility, about what behaviors lead to a person becoming a victim of carders. And after that he himself became a victim of carders: on the advice of friends and relatives, he invested a third of his pension savings in a financial pyramid.
The second mechanism is playing on emotions. Carders evoke feelings of guilt and shame, fear, excitement, greed, trust, and so on. Often there is not even one emotion, but several, they are often intertwined. I can give examples.
Nowadays, many car carders present the victim with a scratch allegedly left by his car, and spin him for big money, threatening him with criminal liability. A scratch on a bumper is clearly not worth as much as they squeeze out of a person, and no criminal liability is provided for it, but fear and guilt prevent you from thinking soberly.
Many people are afraid of people in uniform. Carders also use this, posing as police and military officers. Others fear their money will be stolen, and carders channel this fear by posing as bank security officers. Still others think that something will happen to their loved ones, and this experience is also exploited.
Greed becomes a bait when no one knows who is transferring money to you, and you do not inform the bank. It is also nice to find benefits in everyday and social contexts, profitable acquaintances, and romantic and commercial carders cling to such networking.
Greed also manifests itself when an item on Avito has a suspiciously low price, but is so profitable that you want it to be true - and you go to communicate in the messenger and send money without receiving the goods and confirmation from Avito itself that that one has been sent. Or another example: a person verbally agreed with a certain employer, but he is told that for some reason he needs to transfer money - for example, for registration on a service necessary for work. You don’t want to lose your earnings - especially if the announced payment is very good - and the person transfers money over and over again. In addition to greed, at these moments passion also comes into play, like in a casino - such a moderate thirst for risk.
Carding based on trust is when you are praised, singled out, and told that you are smart. Perhaps they are leaking “insider information” to you, and you obediently go to invest your money.
The third mechanism that carders exploit is the brain’s desire to save energy. Thinking is an energy-consuming activity. Saving energy, the brain makes sure that we perform most actions automatically. Without thinking too much about what exactly we are doing, whether we like it or not, whether there are any alarm bells. It takes time and effort to engage critical thinking. Carders don’t give you time - you need to urgently give your information to a bank employee, otherwise they will open a case against you, invest money as quickly as possible, because then the opportunity for investment will disappear.
— What experiences are typical for victims of carders?
— First of all, self-accusation and self-punishment. The person blames himself for becoming a victim, although he should be angry at the carders. It is very important to recognize this anger and not be afraid of it. If you don’t do this, the psyche will shift these experiences onto yourself, sublimating unlived emotions into severe auto-aggression. Or on other people who have nothing to do with this situation: for example, on loved ones.
It is impossible to predict how much a particular victim of carding will suffer: each case is individual, each person has his own values. Some people have the hardest time accepting the fact that they have been deprived of money and property. Others find it difficult to forgive themselves for falling for a banal carding scheme, because they value their intelligence most of all, and this is considered the behavior of a stupid person.
Still others are traumatized by the very fact of deception, because their main value is relationships with other people. They believe that people are generally good and that the world is kind and fair. It turns out that this is not the case, and it hurts. Even if the amount stolen is small, it can be very difficult for them to accept because the psychological damage from carding is not directly proportional to the financial one. Although, of course, the risk of psychological trauma is higher if all savings have disappeared or the person ends up with huge debts to the bank.
In addition, it is very important what state the person was in initially and how resistant he is to stress. If there is already a certain level of mental vulnerability and woundedness, a psychological crisis or mental disorder, a person is automatically prone to self-blame and black and white thinking, and is also vulnerable to stress in general. Such people can subjectively perceive even minor carding as a tragedy.
Conversely, mentally stable people who have everything going well in their lives are more likely to let things go easily, even if they have lost a lot of money. Instead of deciding that they themselves are to blame or that no one can be trusted, they distinguish between a single situation in life and life as a whole and know how to calm themselves down. For example, think that there are simply such bad people and now their karma is bad, but you should not lose even more because of them, wasting time and energy thinking about what happened.
— How to recover if you become a victim of carders?
— First of all, go to a psychologist, ideally immediately after this happened. It is not necessary to turn this into long-term therapy, if money is not enough - a few sessions will be enough. It’s clear that you don’t want to spend money after you’ve been robbed. But this is the fastest way to help yourself and ensure that you continue to have the strength to work and live.
Recovery from deception is based on regaining self-worth. A person needs to learn not to focus on the fact that an accident has happened to him. Instead, you should try to revive your faith in your own strength. And also to appreciate what remains - for example, the support of loved ones, health, your professional skills, which have not disappeared anywhere.
That is, it is necessary to devalue an unpleasant experience to a certain, but healthy degree, and turn it from tragic into simply unpleasant. Usually the opposite process occurs: a person constantly thinks about this situation and that there is no way out of it. And then he evaluates everything that happens to him next through the prism of this.
What can you do to help yourself? Firstly, this gratitude technique is now very popular: once a day, write three to five things for which you are grateful to other people, yourself, God/the universe. It helps to get rid of the fixation on the bad, which after a traumatic situation becomes literally hardwired into our brain. Secondly, you should turn to your loved ones for support. It is people who heal people.
I also recommend reading “Living Between Worlds” by James Hollis, “The Wisdom of Worry” by Cheryl Paul, and “How to Survive Life's Difficult Times” by Kristen Nefor and Christopher Germer. Three books, varied in depth and topic, that help you regain trust in yourself and others and get through difficult times after you've been deceived.
However, it is worth understanding: if carding occurred at a vulnerable moment in life and led to serious consequences in the inner world, it will not be possible to simply forget about it and live as before. It is an illusion that you can completely get out of a traumatic situation and forget it, as if it never happened. Its echoes will influence a person one way or another.
It will likely be difficult to trust others and your anxiety levels will increase. It is worth giving yourself time and considering it normal that now you are not happy to introduce new interesting people into your life, but are very careful in choosing your acquaintances.
(c) https://journal.tinkoff.ru/psihologicheskie-tryki-moshennikov/
