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My Experiences with Scammers and Fakes
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My Experiences with Scammers and Fakes I have been on a few dating/hookup sites, starting with Ashley Madison 6 years ago. The number of fakes and scammers is mind-boggling. Apparently they make enough money to warrant being a full-time activity, but I do not see how. The number of people using online dating for the first time must be dwindling, and there are so many free advice places on how to avoid scammers. But maybe that is too optimistic an attitude on my part. I am especially salty about scammers on dating/hookup sites. If someone is greedy and looking for a get-rich-quick scheme on a purported stock investment site, they get what they deserve. But people who are simply trying to find love or sex do not deserve to be scammed. I do not know how these fakes sleep at night. One of the things I notice is that 99% of them are not native speakers, and there are some grammar giveaways. They can not deal with participles well, so their sentence constructions are often stilted. (Though, as I am a self-confessed "grammar nazi," I have to admit very few people are likely notice such things.) They often repeat themselves ("So what are you looking for in a relationship?") because they either do not remember where they are in a conversation, or they are picking responses from a menu and click on the wrong one, I am guessing. I think that is so because often they have these machine-gun questions, some of which were already answered. I did run into one native speaker scammer early on - that was a hard one to be sure of. They wrote decently, and in idiomatic English. They also tried to box me into a corner about taking care of friends, and trying to admit we were friends. They were fairly subtle about it, so I got one of the most persuasive scammers I ever encountered early on. The initial indicator for me was, after several days of chat, they refused voice or video chats because their phone "can't do video chats." As a person who has traveled fairly extensively, middle class people in third world countries have video capability on their phone. So that is an alarm bell to be sure. The other thing was even though the person claimed to be a nurse, they were too destitute to pay for their phone, and so wanted me to send money via an iTunes card. Of course, the first rule of the internet is not sending money (the second being don't enter credit card info on a mystery site) without knowing for sure who you are sending it to. But I hadn't run into the iTunes bit before, and when I looked it up, sure enough it was a classic way to ask for money by scammers. As an aside about Ashley Madison, I am all about discretion, and the hack definitely spooked me. Especially because I started getting emails in the burner mailbox about know who I was and saying I'd better pay them or they would out me to my family. Interesting thing was, they had just enough right to be scary, but certain details were off. After taking a breather, I realized the details that were off would not have been if the sender actually had all my info from the site, so I ignored it. Turns out to have been the right way to go. Nothing changes faster than the speed of love. - Rush |
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 good observations
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