You will be able to raise a suspected scam with a friend or relative without pushing them away.
Your aunt has started mentioning a man called Richard. He's a widower, an engineer working overseas, and they talk every night. Last week she asked you how to do an overseas bank transfer. This week she seemed tired and said something about "a customs problem" she was helping him with. You've just finished module 5's first two lessons, and every alarm in your head is going off.
The obvious move is to tell her straight out: "Auntie, this is a scam." It's also the move most likely to fail. This lesson is about what to do instead, so that the conversation keeps her talking to you rather than to him.
By the time a romance or pig-butchering scam reaches the money stage, the victim has spent weeks, often months, in what feels like a real relationship. The scammer has been the first message in the morning and the last at night. Your aunt isn't weighing up a suspicious offer. She's defending someone she loves.
So when you say "he's a scammer", she hears an attack on him and on her judgement. People in that position often dig in. They defend the scammer, stop mentioning him, and move the conversation somewhere you can't see it. Scammers expect this and prepare for it. Many tell victims early on that family "won't understand" or "will be jealous", so your warning arrives already explained away. This is the secrecy lever from lesson 1.1, Every scam is built from the same four levers, and it works well on family.
Shame works against you too. If she has already sent money, admitting it was a scam means admitting she lost it, maybe a lot of it. It can feel easier to keep believing and keep paying. Lesson 1.2, Why clever, careful people still get scammed, covered how shame keeps victims quiet. Here it can keep a scam running.
Questions get further than conclusions because they let the person look at the facts themselves. You're asking, not accusing, and she stays in charge of the answer.
Good questions are open and curious. They can't be answered with a yes or no, and they don't carry a verdict hidden inside them. Some examples:
How did the two of you first start talking? What does he do for work, and where is he based right now? What's stopped him from coming to visit so far? What happened with the customs problem, and how did it get sorted?
Listen to the full answer and resist correcting anything yet. The point isn't to catch her out. It's to hear the story in her words. Often the gaps become clear to her as she says them out loud: the visits that keep falling through, the video calls that never happen, the money that was meant to be repaid.
If she's being steered towards an investment, ask about that the same way. Which app does he use? How did he find it? Has she taken any money out yet, and what happened when she tried?
Once the story is on the table, offer to look at it with her. "Can you show me the app? I'm curious how it works" lands much better than "Show me the evidence".
There are two checks you can do side by side. If there's a platform involved, look it up together in the MAS Financial Institutions Directory and the Investor Alert List, the way you learned in lesson 4.2. If there's a person involved, do a reverse image search on one of his profile photos. Search engines let you upload a photo and find where else it appears online. Scammers usually take their photos from real people's social media, so the same face may show up under a different name, or on a page warning about scam profiles.
Let her be the one who finds the result. A mismatch she discovers carries far more weight than one you announce.
If the checks raise doubts, the next step is a call to someone whose job this is. You don't need to decide for her. Offer to sit with her while she calls her bank's official hotline, or the ScamShield Helpline, whose number is listed on the ScamShield website. The bank can look at transfers she has made and advise on stopping further ones. Helpline staff hear these stories every day and can explain what they're seeing without the emotional weight you carry as family.
"Would you like to call them together, just to check?" leaves the choice with her, and that matters, because people who feel pushed tend to push back while people who feel helped usually accept it.
If money has already moved, lesson 8.1, The first fifteen minutes: call the bank and freeze, sets out what to do and how fast.
Sometimes the first conversation goes badly. She gets angry, or defensive, or says she'll think about it and then goes quiet. That's common, and it isn't the end.
What matters most is that she knows she can come back to you without hearing "I told you so". Say it plainly: "Whatever happens, you can tell me, and I won't be angry." If the scam continues, she'll hit the next crisis or the next blocked withdrawal, and you want to be the person she calls when that happens.
Then stay in touch the way you normally would. Ask about her week. Don't make every call about Richard. Shame makes people hide further losses, and silence from family leaves the scammer as the only voice she hears.
The hardest part of this conversation is the first few minutes, and that's mostly down to what you ask. In the activity you'll draft three open questions of your own for someone you suspect is caught in an online relationship scam.
Write three open questions you could ask someone you suspect is in an online relationship scam.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).