"It Felt Real" Victim Perspectives on Platform Design and Longer-Running Scams

Longer-running scams, such as romance fraud and "pig-butchering" scams, exploit not only victims' emotions but also the design of digital platforms. Scammers commonly leverage features such as professional-looking profile verification, algorithmic recommendations that reinforce contact, integrated payment systems, and private chat affordances to gradually establish trust and dependency with victims. Prior work in HCI and criminology has examined online scams through the lenses of detection mechanisms, threat modeling, and user-level vulnerabilities. However, less attention has been paid to how platform design itself enables longer-running scams. To address this gap, we conducted in-depth interviews with 25 longer-running scam victims in China. Our findings show how scammers strategically use platform affordances to stage credibility, orchestrate intimacy, and sustain coercion with victims. By analyzing scams as socio-technical projects, we highlight how platform design can be exploited in longer-running scams, and point to redesigning future platforms to better protect users.