Quick Comments - Danish Deception on TikTok

The "Danish Deception" series by the lady on TikTok has sparked an uncomfortable conversation about how our assumptions regarding race, nationality, and appearance create blind spots that scammers expertly exploit. At its core, the series chronicles a journey of self-realization that many Black individuals navigate: the painful recognition that colorism and internalized racism don't just damage self-worth; they make us vulnerable.

The conversations around the story speak to ways we as Black humans are consciously and unconsciously wired to embrace the preference for lighter skin. In doing so, cut people some slack on the basis of how they look or because of belonging to some social, religious, or genetic category while being wickedly judgemental to others outside that category. The type of slack and compassion some folks won't even extend to themselves.

The premise challenges a dangerous fallacy: that fraud has a face, an accent, or a passport. "There are scammers everywhere and at every level of society," as one of the Swedish lecturers observed during a lecture at Uppsala. "The difference is the level of sophistication and how it is packaged." Yet, the belief that people from certain backgrounds, with certain features, or holding certain passports are somehow exempt from moral corruption continues to persist. The problem with this type of cognitive bias is not just that it is wrong; it is the kind of vulnerability that sophisticated con artists weaponize with their targets.

Social engineering thrives on these prejudices. When we assume that someone cannot be capable of evil because of their religion, race, or nationality, we have already lost the plot. The scammer who understands this can wear our bias like camouflage, hiding in plain sight behind our preconceptions. They know that a skin color, accent, or geographical location functions as a kind of social credential, an unearned trust that can auto-opens some doors while the same doors get slammed on the face of others without questions asked.

But the "Danish Deception" series cuts deeper than simple fraud awareness. It opens up the historical rot of our society: centuries of eugenics, systematic racism, and colonial violence that taught generations of Black people to internalize a hierarchy of human worth based on melanin. This self-hatred manifests in countless destructive ways, perhaps none more insidious than the belief that proximity to whiteness offers protection, elevation, or some kind of "redemption" from whatever. It's often the stories of someone getting burnt because of this mindset. It is tiring.

Consider the psychology at play: a Black person, exhausted by constant discrimination (passive, direct, aggressive), is frustrated to the point where they think something is wrong with their kind and suddenly start devaluing their own reflection in the mirror. They may gravitate toward relationships with lighter-skinned or white partners—not from genuine connection, but from a desperate place of hoping that their mixed-race offspring might somehow escape the cruelty their generations before had endured. It seems like a smart survival strategy born from trauma, until it is not. Those predators, like the man in the alleged royalty relationship scam, can recognize people operating with this state of mind immediately and weaponize it.

What appears to be preference is often fetishization dressed in the language of "colorblindness" or, worse, framed as charitable. The White or Black partner who presents their relationship with a person of a different race as moral grandstanding, "doing some good in the world," reveals the ugly truth: they have commodified their partner's race while claiming to transcend racism. This dynamic barely shields anyone from racism; rather, it reproduces systemic discrimination in the most intimate spaces of our lives. Folks end up being played.

The cruelty is in the irony that those fleeing one form of discrimination often land in the same situation—manifested in a different form. The belief that skin color determines a person's worth will always be the elephant in the room. When we refuse to see past color, when we measure human value on a skin color scale from dark to light, we become vulnerable to anyone who promises to move us up that fictitious ladder. We miss the opportunity to make real connections with real humans.

This is why collective condemnation of a group of people based on nationality or race is equally toxic, whether declaring entire groups "good" or "bad." Such thinking abandons individual complexity and the intersectionality of our interwoven existence for the false comfort of categories we sometimes create in our heads. People change. Circumstances can bring out the worst in anyone. Life happens regardless of race, gender, background, or nationality.