A year ago, there was an Internet love story that simply went awry. What started out as an ideal relationship between Raymond Merrill and Regina Rachid ended in Raymond Merrill’s death. The relationship started wonderfully, Raymond believed that he had an “immediate rapport” with Regina after his first conversation. They both met on an online dating site (the article could not disclose which one) and the relationship that developed seemed wonderful, Regina even wrote poems to Raymond that were incredibly poetic, loving and heartfelt. Their relationship developed into something quite serious; Raymond even traveled from Cleveland, OH to go visit her in Brazil, where she lived. He visited her on numerous occasions and their relationship seemed extremely genuine and real.
On Raymond’s final visit to Brazil to visit his newfound love, something really disturbing happened; his lover’s intentions were not really love at all. It turns out, Regina was not trying to find love at all on the Internet, instead she was trying to find a naïve and desperate guy to swindle money out of. During Raymond’s final visit to Brazil, he went missing and all of his bank accounts had been drained and all of the money had been put into Regina’s account. It turns out Regina had an accomplice, her boyfriend, to aid her in this scheme to steal money, and to help her strangle and dispose of Raymond by burning him in a car. A relationship that started out by exchanging a few words online ended in the death of an innocent man seeking true love.
This article touched upon the issue of deception, but in a way that is different from most stories that discuss people lying about their age, identity, weight, height, gender etc. Deception is so easy on the internet given the tremendous ability to be anonymous and create a persona of yourself that may or may no be true. This article demonstrates the lengths people will go to simply gain a few dollars. Regina and Raymond engaged in quite a serious relationship for an extended period of time, investing a tremendous amount of time and effort. Although one person was honest about their intentions, the other one was not.
There are two types of deception: message based and identity based deception. It is apparent in this story that Regina did not exhibit identity deception that is, she did not falsely manipulate the identity she presented to Raymond. She didn’t lie about her appearance, or any of the traditional assessment signals. Regina and Raymond met on numerous occasions so there were clearly a number of assessment signals used to confirm what they said to one another over the Internet was true. This article however, exhibits a great deal of the second type of deception, message based. While it did not go into much detail about their conversations with one another, it was clear that Regina was manipulating the information she conveyed to Raymond to deceive him into believing that she did in fact love him (i.e. love letters and poems).
According to Wallace, we often are attracted to a person who is close to us in space or time, this article demonstrates that proximity doesn’t necessarily mean geographically close (one person live in Brazil and one person live in the U.S), rather, there are in the same place at the same time when the are talking on a dating website. Both Raymond and Regina had an “immediate rapport with one another” meaning that they had a tremendous amount of common ground and had similar opinions on a variety of subjects. In addition, this ‘immediate rapport’ actually contradicts the notion of disinhibition effects that Wallace mentions. Regina and Raymond were not wary of one another they simply understood one another and self-disclosed a great deal of information from the start.
McKenna’s concept of identifiability, that as people learn more about each other, they tend to self disclose more also known as the stranger on the train effect. This brought both Raymond and Regina closer to one another since it encouraged both of them to disclose more details about themselves since both their private self awareness was high, even though Regina’s information was deceptive. Since much detail of the conversations between Regina and Raymond was not disclosed, it’s hard to assess whether there was a removal of gating features. Interactional control played a major role in this scheme, by manipulating the media by which Regina communicated with Raymond, she could convince him of her love and fake feelings in a much easier way (i.e. e-mails, letters, im chat) than constantly having to lie and be convincing of her love to his face which is much more difficult. And finally, the most important aspect to this deception, McKenna’s concept of ‘getting the goods’. Regina had to know that Raymond had significant funds in his bank accounts and learn a great deal about him to know that he was worth investing so much of her time and effort. It’s amazing the lengths people will go to con a person out of a few dollars and how they will stop at nothing to achieve this.
2 comments:
The story of Regina and Ray boggles my mind! You did an excellent job of incorporating the deception theory and relationship factors. You first provide the necessary details of the story, and then explain the details you just mentioned with the pertinent concept. I especially like how you touched upon the idea of gating features- Regina must have had some information on which to base her whole scheme on,and the internet makes it so easy to google people to find out what they are all about. I think this story has an additional component that is beyond deception through the internet, because Ray visited Regina several times before his final trip. This means that Rita had to be just as convincing in person- which could prove more difficult because of the interpersonal cues that exist in ftf communication.
It makes me wonder if Ray was psychologically prone to something like this happening, or was Regina so good at deceiving and understanding relationship factors, that she would have been able to pull her stunt on any rich guy.
Good find on this article, it is a very good example of deception online and touches on many of the things we discussed in class. The fact that their relationship built so fast definitely goes along with McKenna’s factor of anonymity and an increase in self-disclosure. Relating to the relationship formation ideas, it is much easier cause self-disclosure in another person if your intentions are to get them to reveal more information about themselves. The fact that he flew out from Ohio all the way to Brazil several meant that he either missed many red flags leading up to that point, or the con artist has a very firm grasp over self presentation with a positive bias. Like Diane said in her comment, multiple trips really complicates the story because it seems unnecessary for him to have come multiple times. The con artist must have also have been very convincing in Ftf interactions which may go against the hypothesis that CMC deception is easier than Ftf. I think it would be really interesting to find similar scams in only Ftf interactions and compare the differences with a strictly CMC based deception.
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