The Value of a Victim – a Scammer’s Justification

The Value of a Life: Scam Victims, Moral Illusions, and the Justification of Harm

Primary Category: Philosophy of Scams

Intended Audience: Scam Victims-Survivors / Family & Friends / General Public / Others

Author:
•  Tim McGuinness, Ph.D. – Anthropologist, Scientist, Director of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.

About This Article

When you are victimized by a scam, it can feel as though your entire identity was reduced to a number on someone else’s balance sheet, but your life was never measured by what you lost. Scammers live in a world where harm is justified by twisted ideas of a greater good, convincing themselves that stealing from one person to serve many is somehow noble. Just like in John Harris’s thought experiment, where a life could be sacrificed for the benefit of others under the illusion of moral righteousness, scammers rewrite betrayal into a story of survival. But real morality is not measured in numbers. It rests on respecting the dignity and humanity of each individual life, something scammers refuse to do.

If you have been through this, it is vital to understand that you were not chosen because of weakness or fault. You were caught in someone else’s self-serving narrative, without consent, without fairness, and without justification. Your pain is real. Your anger is real. Your confusion is real. Yet none of it defines you. Healing begins when you reclaim your own story, when you refuse to be the casualty of someone else’s lies, and when you recognize that trust, hope, and kindness remain powerful parts of who you are. Recovery is not about forgetting what happened; it is about choosing to value yourself more fiercely than those who tried to harm you ever could. Your life, your heart, and your future are priceless, and they deserve to be honored by you, now and always. The betrayal was never a reflection of your worth. The choice to heal is.

The Value of a Life: Scam Victims, Moral Illusions, and the Justification of Harm

Scammers, Morality, and the Value of a Single Scam Victim’s Life: A Reflection for Scam Victims

“The Value of a Single Crime Victim Exceeds the Value of a Thousand Criminals!”
– Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.

A Thought Experiment on Sacrifice and Morality

In 1975, philosopher John Harris proposed a thought experiment that continues to challenge our understanding of morality. He asked us to imagine a world where society, in an effort to save as many lives as possible, institutes a lottery system. Every citizen is given a ticket. If your number is drawn, you are selected to “give life”—a euphemism for being killed so that your organs can be harvested to save three other people who are dying from organ failure. In this imagined society, no one has done anything wrong. None of the sick individuals deserves their fate. There is no crime, no punishment, only random chance determining who lives and who dies.

Harris suggested that the horror of this system might be softened through language. Instead of saying someone is “killed,” society might frame it as a noble sacrifice, praising those chosen as heroes who “gave life” to others. By adjusting the words, the brutal reality is disguised, making it easier for people to accept something that is deeply unsettling.

At first glance, the idea might seem efficient. If saving lives is inherently good, then surely saving three lives at the cost of one must be three times better than saving just one. From a cold, utilitarian perspective, it appears logical. After all, chance already governs so much of life. One person is struck by disease, another walks away unharmed from a disaster. Fate, randomness, and luck play enormous roles in who survives and who does not. Would formalizing chance into a life-saving system be so different?

And yet, something deep within us recoils at the suggestion. No matter how mathematically sound it appears, no matter how much language tries to soften it, the fundamental wrongness remains. It is not simply about the numbers. It is about dignity, agency, and the profound value of individual human life. To strip a person of their agency, to end a life without consent, even for the supposed greater good, violates an essential moral boundary. It reduces a human being to a means to an end rather than honoring them as an end in themselves.

Harris’s thought experiment forces us to confront a difficult truth: moral goodness cannot be measured purely by outcomes. Respect for individual life, autonomy, and dignity must anchor our decisions, or else we risk building a society where horrifying acts are excused in the name of efficiency.

The Twisted Justifications of Scammers

This thought experiment naturally leads us into the strange moral universe that scammers inhabit. Much like the cold rationality in the organ lottery, scammers often create twisted justifications for their crimes. They do not always see themselves as villains. Instead, many convince themselves that they are serving a greater good. In their minds, stealing from one person is justified because it feeds many others. They tell themselves they are supporting their families, their children, even their wider communities. The harm they cause becomes acceptable if it can be framed as sacrifice for a larger purpose.

Scammers rewrite the story of betrayal into a story of heroism. They imagine themselves as warriors or providers, not criminals. They think, “It is better that the money helps many than stays with one rich person,” or, “They can afford the loss, but my family cannot.” Some even go further and decide, “I deserve this more than they do.” Each thought distances them emotionally from the reality of what they are doing. It makes the violation of another human being feel like a necessity instead of a choice.

This is a powerful moral illusion. It allows scammers to replace real empathy with cold calculation. It allows them to dehumanize their victims, to see them not as individuals with their own lives and struggles, but as faceless sources of wealth. In doing so, scammers make it bearable to inflict devastating harm without confronting the full emotional and ethical weight of their actions. Just as Harris’s organ lottery uses softened language to mask the brutality of death, scammers also find ways to dress up betrayal with prettier words, masking cruelty under the illusion of duty, need, or destiny.

You Were Not Chosen Because You Were Weak

If you have been the victim of a scam, it is important to understand something very clearly: you were not chosen because you were weak. You were not targeted because you were foolish or because you somehow deserved what happened. Scammers do not pick their victims based on strength or worthiness. They pick based on opportunity and the need to create a story that lets them live with the harm they cause. You were caught in their narrative, not because of who you are, but because they needed someone to hurt in order to justify their actions to themselves.

In the twisted moral world they live in, you became like an unwilling organ donor. Just as in the thought experiment, where lives are taken under the illusion of serving a greater good, the scammer sacrificed your trust, your hopes, and your dreams to serve their needs. They did not ask for your consent. They did not give you a choice. Your dignity, your autonomy, and your rights were pushed aside the moment they decided their desires were more important than your humanity. You were never part of a fair decision. You were simply treated as a means to an end.

It is crucial to see this clearly. There is no real morality in what they did. Their actions were not noble sacrifices. Their words about helping others or providing for their families are just stories used to mask selfishness. Behind their justifications, there is only self-interest, hidden behind a carefully constructed mask of noble-sounding excuses. Recognizing this truth is not about carrying more anger. It is about freeing yourself from the false guilt that scammers want victims to carry. You did not lose your worth because of what happened. In fact, your worth is proven by the simple fact that you still value dignity, fairness, and truth, even when they did not.

When Numbers Replace Humanity

Scammers, like the society in Harris’s thought experiment, replace the value of a person with a calculation. They see money gained, families fed, debts paid.

In the world of scams, just as in the thought experiment proposed by John Harris, something tragic happens: the irreplaceable value of a human being is reduced to numbers and cold calculations. Scammers stop seeing their victims as people. They do not see individuals with lives full of meaning, with families, with stories, with dreams that stretch across decades. Instead, they train themselves to see only opportunity. They see money gained, bills paid, debts erased, comforts bought, status elevated. They tell themselves that the suffering of one is acceptable if it secures the well-being of many.

In their mental world, you are no longer a person; you are a transaction. They do not see the long hours you spend struggling to rebuild your sense of safety. They do not see you waking up from nightmares or sitting in silence, wondering how your life unraveled so quickly and so cruelly. They do not feel the isolation that creeps into your relationships because you now find it hard to trust, even those closest to you. They do not understand the ripple effect their betrayal sends through your family, your work, your future.

When numbers replace humanity, the justifications become endless. It becomes easier to tell lies, to commit betrayal after betrayal, to ignore the broken hearts and broken spirits left behind. It becomes simple to convince oneself that taking from you was not just acceptable, but necessary. Scammers convince themselves that survival excuses anything, that desperation gives them moral permission to destroy another human being’s inner world. They cling to the idea that because they “needed” the money, the harm they inflicted was somehow less real, less cruel, less unforgivable.

But the truth remains untouched by their excuses. No amount of desperation, no amount of need, no story of sacrifice makes it right to betray another human being. No cause, no justification, no hunger or hardship ever makes it morally acceptable to shatter someone’s dignity, to steal their dreams, or to tear apart the trust they placed in others.

It is not just about the money lost. It is about the theft of your peace of mind. It is about the emotional wreckage left behind. It is about the courage it now takes every day to live with wounds that nobody else sees but that you carry silently in your heart.

The greatest danger of reducing people to numbers is that it blinds those who do harm to the true depth of their cruelty. It lets them sleep at night, telling themselves stories of necessity and survival. But you must never accept their narratives as your own. You must never believe that your pain was “justified” because it served someone else’s needs. Your life, your trust, your hopes, and your future are not disposable assets on someone else’s balance sheet.

You mattered before the scam. You matter now. And no calculation, no rationalization, no desperate lie from a scammer can ever erase the humanity, the worth, or the dignity that has always belonged to you.

The False Morality of “Greater Good” Thinking

The idea that it is acceptable to harm one person in the name of helping many is not new. History is full of examples where individuals or even entire groups have been sacrificed under the claim of serving a so-called greater good. Tyrannies, atrocities, betrayals, and countless injustices have been born out of this twisted belief. It gives people permission to commit terrible acts while still seeing themselves as virtuous. It allows wrongdoers to hide cruelty behind noble language. It creates the illusion that if the outcome benefits enough people, the harm inflicted along the way somehow stops mattering.

But real morality is never simply about numbers. True morality is rooted in the recognition of the inherent worth of every individual. It is not about calculating gains and losses as if people were commodities. It is about holding sacred the dignity of each life, no matter how small the action, no matter how great the supposed cause. It is about protecting the vulnerable precisely because they are vulnerable, not exploiting them when it becomes convenient. It is about seeing another person’s trust, dreams, and humanity as something inviolable, something that must not be used for personal gain.

We have seen this tension play out even in recent history. During the COVID-19 pandemic, entire societies made decisions that placed the freedom, livelihood, and autonomy of individuals against the perceived welfare of the majority. Lockdowns, restrictions, and mandates were imposed under the banner of protecting public health. While many of these actions were motivated by a real desire to save lives, they also revealed how easily individual rights can be set aside when the collective outcome is seen as more important. For some, the loss of businesses, the collapse of mental health, the isolation of the elderly, and the curtailing of personal freedoms were dismissed as necessary sacrifices. It became too easy to minimize the suffering of individuals in the name of serving a greater good. Even well-intentioned actions, when justified only by numbers, can cause real and lasting harm if they forget the dignity of each person affected.

When we allow ourselves to believe that the ends justify the means, we lose sight of the very heart of justice. Justice is not a calculation of benefit. It is a commitment to treating each person as an end in themselves, never as a tool or a sacrifice for someone else’s survival. Once we start ranking whose pain matters and whose can be dismissed, we have abandoned any real moral foundation. True morality demands that we refuse to step on others, even when our own needs feel overwhelming. It calls us to protect rather than to plunder.

You were never expendable. You were never a nameless, faceless means to someone else’s selfish end. Your dreams, your emotions, your trust, and your life mattered deeply then, even if the scammer refused to see it. And they still matter now. Nothing that was done to you erased your worth. No betrayal, no theft, no cruel lie can take away the fact that your life holds a value beyond any calculation. Your healing, your dignity, and your future are not built on their lies. They are built on the unshakable truth that your humanity is not negotiable and never was.

The Experience of Being Sacrificed Without Consent

Coming out of a scam often feels like waking up in a nightmare you did not even know you had entered. It is the shocking realization that while you thought you were building something real, someone else was quietly dismantling your trust for their own benefit. There is a coldness to it that is hard to explain to anyone who has not lived it. A deep sense of having been used like an object, rather than treated like a human being with hopes, dignity, and worth.

Victims often describe feeling hollow, as if something vital inside them has been torn away. There is a numbness that wraps around your heart and your mind. A fear that clutches your chest when you try to imagine trusting anyone again. You stand there in a heavy fog where nothing feels certain. Doubting your memories. Doubting your instincts. Doubting your ability to ever feel safe in the world again. It feels as though the ground under your feet is no longer solid, and every step forward feels like a risk you are too fragile to take.

These feelings are not a sign of weakness. They are not proof that you were naive or foolish. They are the natural, human reaction to being betrayed at the deepest level. They are the psychological scars left when someone else treated your kindness as a tool, your dreams as an opportunity, your trust as disposable. Being sacrificed without your knowledge or consent is one of the most profound violations a person can experience, because it strikes at the very core of your identity and your sense of belonging in the world.

Healing begins by telling yourself a simple but powerful truth: your pain is real. Your devastation is not an overreaction. Your fear, your grief, your anger — they are valid. They are normal responses to an experience that was profoundly abnormal. And none of it happened because of any flaw or failure inside of you. It happened because someone else chose to exploit your goodness and your belief in the better parts of human nature.

Support is essential in rebuilding from this kind of trauma. You cannot and should not try to walk this road alone. The SCARS Institute support and recovery program was created for victims exactly like you — people who have been betrayed, discarded, and left to pick up the pieces without a map. SCARS provides not just information, but structured emotional support, survivor-led guidance, and a recovery process based on real psychological principles. It offers a path where you are not treated like a case or a problem to be solved, but recognized and respected as a human being who deserves care, dignity, and a future.

There is no shame in needing help. Healing from being sacrificed without your consent is not something anyone is meant to do alone. Finding your footing again takes time, patience, and people around you who understand the kind of pain that cannot be seen from the outside. SCARS understands. And there are others who have walked through the same fog and found their way back to themselves.

You are not broken. You are not beyond repair. You are someone who endured the unimaginable and still has the strength to heal, one honest step at a time.

Why You Must Reclaim Your Humanity

When you are targeted by a scammer, the harm goes far beyond financial loss. Scammers strip away things much deeper and much more personal than money. They damage your ability to trust. They tear at your sense of hope. They try to diminish your belief in your own worth and your ability to judge the world safely. The impact is not just about numbers in a bank account. It is about wounds that cut into your very identity.

Part of recovery — and perhaps the most important part — is about reclaiming what they tried to steal from you: your humanity. It is about refusing to let their lies define you. It is about refusing to let the experience of being used turn into a belief that you are somehow lesser because of it.

You are not a statistic. You are not simply another case file, another story in a database, another loss to be calculated. You are a living, breathing human being with feelings, dreams, dignity, and the power to heal. No scammer can ever truly take that from you unless you allow their harm to settle permanently in your heart. Reclaiming your humanity is not about pretending the scam never happened. It is about standing up and saying that you are still here, and you are still worthy of everything they tried to deny you.

Steps to Begin Reclaiming Your Humanity

Acknowledge the Harm Without Accepting Blame

The first step is to acknowledge what happened without turning the pain inward against yourself. Recognize that real harm was done to you. You are not imagining it. But also recognize that you did not cause it. You were deceived, not defective. You were targeted because you had qualities scammers knew how to exploit: trust, hope, generosity, and the capacity for love. Those are not flaws. They are strengths that were weaponized against you, and they can become strengths again as you heal.

Reaffirm Your Identity Beyond the Scam

It is easy to let the trauma take over your self-image. You might catch yourself thinking of yourself primarily as a “victim” or a “fool.” These labels are heavy and unfair. They shrink your identity down to one painful chapter in a much larger life story. Begin to actively remind yourself of the other parts of who you are: your talents, your kindness, your resilience, your dreams. Write them down if you need to. Speak them aloud. Practice seeing yourself in full color again, not through the gray filter of trauma.

Reconnect with Your Values

Being scammed can shake your faith in the things you once valued — trust, honesty, kindness. You may feel tempted to harden your heart or to stop believing that goodness exists in the world. Resist that temptation. Return to your core values, even if they feel fragile right now. Remind yourself why they mattered to you in the first place. Living according to your values, not abandoning them, is how you take back control over your life story.

Engage with Safe, Trustworthy People

Part of reclaiming your humanity is reconnecting with safe human connection. This does not mean trusting everyone blindly. It means learning, step by step, to experience positive, respectful relationships again. Start small if you need to. Attend a SCARS support group where others understand exactly what you have endured. Talk to trusted friends or family members. Allow yourself to be seen and heard by people who do not treat you as a mistake, but as a person deserving of compassion and dignity.

Care for Your Body and Mind

Trauma does not just live in thoughts. It also lives in the body. Taking care of your physical health — getting rest, eating nourishing food, moving your body gently — sends a powerful message to your entire being that you are still worth caring for. Similarly, caring for your mind through therapy, meditation, or journaling helps you reconnect with yourself as a whole, valuable person. Self-care is not indulgence; it is survival and reclamation.

Allow Yourself to Imagine a Future

One of the cruelest effects of a scam is that it steals not just your past stability but your imagined future. It may feel difficult right now to even think about dreams, goals, or plans. That is understandable. But reclaiming your humanity means slowly allowing yourself to envision a future that is not built around loss. It can be small at first — a hope for healing, a wish to feel stronger, a desire to find joy again. Every glimpse you allow yourself of a life beyond the scam is a step toward freedom.

Celebrate Every Step Forward

Recovery is not linear. Some days you will feel strong. Other days you will feel as if you have fallen backwards. That is normal. Healing is messy. What matters is not perfection, but persistence. Every time you acknowledge your pain instead of running from it, every time you treat yourself with kindness instead of cruelty, every time you reach out instead of retreating, you are reclaiming a piece of yourself. Celebrate those moments. They are victories that scammers can never take from you.

You Are More Than What Was Done To You

Reclaiming your humanity after a scam is a revolutionary act. It is how you transform betrayal into resilience. It is how you prove, to yourself more than anyone else, that what they tried to break remains unbroken at its core.

You are not just what happened to you. You are what you choose to build from here. No scammer can rewrite the truth that you are worthy, capable, and still whole inside, no matter what scars you carry.

The road ahead will have challenges, but it is a road you deserve to walk with your head held high. You have the right to heal. You have the right to feel safe again. You have the right to dream again. And you have the right to take back every piece of your humanity that they tried — and failed — to steal.

Breaking Free From Their Story

When you were scammed, you were unwillingly dragged into someone else’s story. A story built on lies, self-justifications, and illusions. In their mind, you became a character they could use. A character they could exploit without guilt, because they convinced themselves it was for a greater good. Their needs, their struggles, their justifications all took center stage. Your hopes, your dreams, and your dignity were treated as disposable.

The scammer created a world where your suffering became invisible to them. In their story, you were the faceless donor of their prosperity. You were not seen as a full human being, but as a means to an end. It was never a story of fairness, or balance, or truth. It was a story fueled by entitlement, by greed, by the ability to dehumanize another person to serve their own desires.

Part of healing is about stepping out of that false story. It is about refusing to live by the twisted rules they believed in. It is about reclaiming your identity, not as a victim trapped in their narrative, but as a survivor writing a new narrative of your own.

You are not the unlucky “loser” in their private lottery. You are not the sacrificial “organ donor” in their imagined moral economy. You were never a participant who agreed to their terms. You were wronged. You were betrayed. And none of it reflects your worth or your intelligence.

You are a survivor of betrayal, not a participant in their so-called greater good. You are someone who endured something terrible and still has the strength to move forward, still has the power to heal, still has the ability to reclaim joy and trust in life.

Now, you get to choose what story you will live by. You get to write it with your own hands, not live by the script someone else forced upon you. You get to create a story where your kindness is not a weakness but a strength. Where your hope is not something to be exploited but something to be nurtured and protected. Where your dreams are not stolen, but honored and pursued with even greater wisdom and courage.

The scammer’s story ends where you choose to end it. Their version of you has no power anymore. Your future belongs to you, and only you. And the life you build from here will be shaped by your resilience, your growth, and your unwavering right to define yourself beyond what was done to you.

You are not their victim anymore. You are the author of what comes next.

Learning to Trust Again Carefully

One of the hardest parts of recovery after a scam is learning how to trust again without falling into a prison of fear. Betrayal leaves deep wounds. It teaches you to doubt not just others, but even yourself. It makes the very idea of trusting again feel dangerous, almost foolish. After all, trusting was what opened the door to the scam, or so it feels.

But living without trust is not living. It is surviving in a state of isolation. It is building walls so high that no one can reach you, including those who might love you, help you, or walk beside you.

You do not have to become cold to protect yourself. You do not have to close yourself off to the world. You do not have to abandon your kindness or your ability to connect. These parts of you are not weaknesses. They are part of your humanity, and they deserve to be preserved.

Instead, you can learn to trust wisely. You can rebuild your ability to trust not by being suspicious of everyone, but by strengthening your instincts with knowledge, education, and experience. Real protection does not come from fear. It comes from awareness.

You can learn to look for signs of honesty and signs of deceit. You can ask more questions. You can set clearer boundaries. You can take the time you need before you place your trust in someone new. Trust does not have to be given all at once. It can be built slowly, one action, one conversation, one experience at a time.

Trust is not the enemy. Blind trust is. Naivety is. Trust that is given without observation or without patience is what puts you at risk. But careful, conscious trust—trust that you choose with your eyes wide open—is one of the greatest strengths you can rebuild.

You have already survived the worst. You have already faced betrayal and lived through the pain. Now you have the opportunity to rebuild your world differently. Not by giving up on people or on yourself, but by becoming wiser, stronger, and more self-assured in your choices.

Learning to trust again is not about forgetting what happened. It is about learning from it, growing from it, and choosing a future where your ability to connect with others remains alive and well—this time, grounded in wisdom and self-respect.

You deserve a life where you can trust, love, and connect again. And step by step, you can create it.

Your Life Is Not Measured in Numbers

Scammers live by numbers. They count what they take. They invent justifications based on how many mouths they feed, how many bills they pay, how many excuses they need to sleep at night. In their world, your suffering becomes a calculation. Your loss becomes a “necessary sacrifice” for someone else’s survival. They weigh your pain against their needs, and they tell themselves that they have balanced the scales.

But you must never make the same mistake.

Your life is not measured in numbers. It is not defined by what you lost. It is not diminished by how much someone else gained at your expense. Your value does not shrink or grow based on any outside measure. It was always complete, and it remains complete now.

Your life is measured in your courage to feel the full weight of what happened and still stand up. It is measured in your strength to heal, even on the days when healing feels impossible. It is measured in your decision to live fully again, not just to survive, but to reclaim your future with open hands and an open heart.

No one ever had the right to treat you as less. No matter how convincing their story, no matter how desperate their situation, they never had the right to violate your trust, to invade your dignity, or to take what was not freely given. They made choices. And those choices reflect them, not you.

You have every right to heal. You have every right to grieve, to be angry, to be confused—and you have every right to grow beyond this. You have every right to rebuild your life, not as a victim forever trapped by the past, but as a survivor who understands that true strength is born through struggle.

You were never just a number in someone else’s story. You were never expendable. You were never just one among many. You are a whole, irreplaceable person, with dreams still waiting to be fulfilled, love still waiting to be given and received, and a future that deserves to be shaped by your own choices.

You still are that person.

And your story is not over yet. In fact, the most powerful chapters may only just be beginning.

A Final Thought to Carry Forward

Healing begins the moment you choose to believe that you are still whole, even with everything you have endured. What was stolen from you does not define you. What you rebuild from this moment forward will. Every small step you take is an act of courage. Every time you choose hope over despair, trust over fear, and love over anger, you are proving that your humanity is stronger than anything they tried to take from you. You are not broken. You are becoming.

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