Dear Sophia, Whoever You Are
There is a reason I call this blog Dear Sophia.
Sophia Rivas is the woman at the heart of the SCAMMED series. To a reader, she is a character. A woman who trusted, questioned, investigated, fought back, and kept going long after others might have told her to let it go.
But to me, Sophia has never been just a character.
She could be you.
Your partner.
Your neighbour.
Your friend.
Your mother, your aunt, your uncle.
Or simply someone you know who found themselves being manipulated, deceived or victimised.
That is what makes her story personal.
Because stories like hers do not only happen to “other people.” They happen to ordinary people, in ordinary lives, often beginning with something that seems completely harmless.
A conversation.
A message.
A connection.
A moment of trust.
And sometimes, by the time you realise something is wrong, you are already standing in the middle of a story you never expected to become part of.
SCAMMED is inspired by real events. Names, circumstances, conversations and certain details became part of a story, but the emotions behind them did not have to be invented.
The disbelief is real.
The questions are real.
The frustration of discovering that finding the truth does not necessarily mean someone will take responsibility is real.
So is the moment when you realise that being victimised is only one part of what follows.
There is the shame people sometimes expect you to carry.
The questions about what you should have seen.
The assumptions about what you should have known.
The uncomfortable suggestion that somehow, because you trusted someone, you must also explain why you did.
That is another reason Sophia matters to me.
She is not written as a helpless victim.
Nor is she a superhero.
She makes mistakes. She doubts herself. She becomes angry. She pushes too hard sometimes. She refuses to accept easy explanations when something still does not make sense.
She is human.
And victims are human.
They are intelligent people.
Cautious people.
Educated people.
Strong people.
People who thought something like this could never happen to them.
Until it did.
Why “Dear”?
Because those two words change the conversation.
Dear Sophia does not sound like the beginning of an investigation.
It is not a court filing.
It is not a complaint.
It is not a demand for answers.
It is personal.
It allows me to step away from the documents, transactions, evidence, institutions and arguments and return to the person standing in the middle of all of it.
Because behind every scam statistic is a person.
Behind every transaction is a story.
Behind every case number is a life that existed before anyone ever opened a file.
That is the Sophia I want to write to.
The woman before it happened.
The woman while it was happening.
And perhaps most importantly, the woman who had to decide what to do after she understood what had happened to her.
Sometimes this blog will be about the books.
Sometimes it will be about scams, manipulation and the psychology behind them.
Sometimes it will be about banks, institutions, regulators, lawyers, systems and the strange gaps that appear when every organisation looks only at its own small piece of a much larger story.
Sometimes it will be about the things I discovered while researching and writing SCAMMED.
And sometimes it may simply be something I wish someone had said to Sophia earlier.
Because for me, SCAMMED was never only about the deception itself.
The more interesting story begins afterwards.
What happens when you start asking questions?
What happens when one answer creates three more?
What happens when you discover that information can exist in different places, while nobody seems responsible for putting the pieces together?
What happens when you are repeatedly told that one organisation can only see this, another can only investigate that, and someone else is responsible for everything in between?
And what happens to the person standing in the middle of all those fragments?
Sophia keeps asking.
That is part of who she is.
But perhaps there is another reason I chose Dear Sophia.
Because I do not want readers to look at her and think:
That could never be me.
I want them to understand how easily a seemingly ordinary situation can become something entirely different.
I want someone who has experienced manipulation or fraud to recognise that they are not reduced to the moment in which they were deceived.
And I want the people around victims to understand that the easiest question -
How could you fall for that?
- is often the least useful one.
A much better question is:
What happened to you?
There is an enormous difference between the two.
One judges.
The other listens.
And perhaps that is what Dear Sophia is really about.
Listening.
Looking closer.
Asking the next question.
And remembering that behind every story of fraud, manipulation or institutional failure, there is still a person whose story deserves to be understood.
Sophia could be anyone.
Maybe that is why she feels so personal.
Dear Sophia,
we’re not finished asking questions yet.
Love,
the part of you that never left
Scammed: The Inside Story of a Perfect Trap explores this space, not as a distant story, but as something that unfolds step by step, often without being noticed until it’s too late.
Because the most dangerous systems are not the ones that look broken.
They are the ones that look perfect.
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