11–20 of 27 posts
This is disgusting… the amount of emotional harm they are causing is incredible. People being tricked like this will be damaged in a way that makes it impossible to trust or connect with others. They are presumably isolated and lonely already or they would not be paying for a dating site. This feels to me like it is akin to rape, an emotional rather than physical rape, but it will make them feel powerless and violate…
Many dating websites don't have a single real woman. They simply exist to lure desperate men to keep swiping and chatting to these human-bots until they realise they have been duped all along, or even never. In fact, this is openly said on affiliate conferences if you visit them, they discuss whole strategies on how to keep people swiping. Same about every other online industry, sometimes worse (literate scams as in…
The porn industry hides coercion, rampant drug abuse, STIs, rape, and an abhorrent human cost paid by its actors.
This man was trapped deep in the grips of a traditional romance scam.
He went on to tell me how he got to that point of his "relationship". And it sounded like every romance scam you've ever heard. The scammer: only communicated by text, asked for small favors at first, alienated him from his family, changed social media accounts and phone numbers often, claimed she was hacked and it was her photos being used to scam other people, etc.
That day I was in shock and the best advice I could muster was something like "be careful before making such life altering decisions". But the encounter bothered me so much that, the next day, I called him and told him the truth, "My dude, you are being scammed." We talked for nearly 2 hours.
The sad part was, I could tell he knew it was a scam. He admitted to often being suspicious. He had all the pieces figured out. But for some reason, maybe hope...maybe desperation, he wouldn't put those pieces together.
I never heard from that guy again. I really hope he came to his senses, but it sounded like he didn't have much support left around him. Anyways, sorry for the long post. Articles on this topic always bring him to mind.
You always think, who falls for this stuff? Well, two years ago, a random service tech came out to my work site and, completely unprompted by me, turned a conversation about scheduling a follow visit into the story of his current predicament. He wouldn't be able to come out next week because: he was selling his house to fly across the US to meet his girlfriend, whom he had never met IRL. This man was trapped deep in…
It's very hard for someone to accept that what they feel is the best thing that ever happened to them, is actually some kind of scam. Logically, most of the victims of this will have plenty of clues, and plenty of reasons to suspect, but they will still keep going along with it because of the strong feelings involved. That is what makes this type of scam so egregious.
Wow. I would not have thought that could work. What happens when the person they are chatting with brings up something from a previous conversation and the person occupying the virtual has no idea how to respond?