Affinity fraud is depressingly common. My own incidental exposure would be comical if the stakes weren’t so serious. I happen to live in a majority African American neighborhood in south Chicagoland. Although you wouldn’t know it to look at me, marketing algorithms based on my street address and some of my purchases apparently reveal that I am a middle-aged, middle-class African American man.

Based on that identification, I get an impressive volume of sales pitches. If the letters, Facebook ads and robo-calls are to be believed, President Obama is obsessed with refinancing my mortgage. Our 44th president particularly wants me to take out a 15-year loan, one much better than what can be found at the bank. He also wants to sell me health insurance and some other things, which would be good for me, and good for the community. Many such deals offer a low interest rate, and are targeted to people in fear of losing their homes. But then they charge hidden or opaque fees for "refinance consultations." Some ask for people’s home titles or pose as intermediaries, falsely promising to make payments to the actual lenders. The details vary, but purveyors of such sales pitches hope that their too-good-to-be-true offering will go down easier when combined with appeals for political or ethnic solidarity.

I sometimes chuckle when I hang up after fielding such a sales call. But there’s nothing funny about efforts to defraud people or to deceptively market products by exploiting people’s personal and communal ties. In light of the empty houses and fading for-sale signs not far from my front door, such pitches are especially terrible, as they purport to offer a way out to many people in deep financial difficulty.

Other communities face similar challenges. In the lead up to the foreclosure crisis, unscrupulous lenders deployed Spanish-speaking saleswomen to target recent immigrants. Once they won consumers’ trust with a persuasive sales pitch, lenders presented consumers with incomprehensible English-language financial documents that often steered people into risky, overpriced, or fraudulent loans. In other cases, con artists offer to help immigrants of the same nationality, and use the opportunity to obtain people’s Social Security numbers and other financial information, which is then used for mortgage fraud.

Pretty much any powerful connection humans make with others provides some correspondingly powerful opportunity for affinity fraud. Here in Chicago, an ex-Marine exploited his service ties to defraud fellow veterans. Affinity fraud is an issue within the LGBTQ community, as well. A terrific Economist story, aptly titled “Fleecing the Flock,” quotes an Alabama regulator’s estimate that half the affinity frauds in that region arise in religious communities. It’s easy to see why. Such communities’ intimate ties of faith and mutual trust create particular vulnerabilities. Traditions such as tithing normalize provision of substantial resources to co-religionists whose financial acuity and probity may be difficult to fully discern. The Church of Latter-day Saints has experienced such a spate of cases that the Economist noted the “hook of Mormon” as a distinctive concern.