They are so greedy, it didn't take me much effort to run a successful phishing campaign against multiple scammers a few years ago, when I got bored.
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My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
91–100 of 172 posts
Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
#92The opening email is hilarious "I am true woman! Scammers are bad!"
For me the most off-putting email was the one describing her favorite breakfast of an omelette, Caesar salad and coffee. Gross!
I don't know about that region, or whether they were trying to create a breakfast that would sound classy but credible to a Westerner.
However, I can say from first hand experience that home cooked Russian breakfasts in Vladivostok were mind bending. As an American, when I eat breakfast but it's a small and simple affair. A cup of oatmeal and some coffee, maybe eggs if I feel ambitious.
The Russians I stayed with made hela breakfast every morning. Like a huge potluck dinner made from recognizable ingredients in very unexpected combinations. While I'm sure they were spoiling me a little because I was a guest, it was always the biggest meal of the day. One memorable example was buttered noodles and meatballs, bread, butter, cheese, cucumber slices, coffee and tea with condensed sweetened milk, and even a little dark chocolate for desert. I'm probably forgetting more stuff.
Also the kids (10 and 8) drank coffee! I think they were mostly in it for the sweetened condensed milk though.
That was an awesome breakfast for sure.
Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people doing the pig butchering are themselves trafficked and working in horrendous slavery conditions in Cambodia: https://theconversation.com/pig-butchering-fraud-the-link-be... https://restofworld.org/2022/cambodias-scam-mills/
I stopped trying to mess with them and string them along after I heard about this.
I used to be mean to scammers and ask if their mother was ashamed of them etc., but I recently tried another tactic and told them I loved them. It works a lot better. One told me his name and where they were located. It costs me nothing to tell them I love them. Maybe they need to hear it.
Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
#94[flagged]
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Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
#95Kazakh names are typically unique planet-wide. There is a very, very low chance of there being another person with the same name. Chances of finding another person with the same name and the same year of birth are practically zero. Edit: Seems like this particular combination is not unique after all. Found quite a few people of the same name. Perhaps they chose a victim which can't be found trivially.
Though the name Aidana is Kazakh, the pictures would be more plausible for a member of the Russian minority in Kazakhstan (15% of the population according to Wikipedia). The article doesn't reveal where those pictures were stolen from, does it? And the voice? Typical spam call centre voice ... Philippines?
Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
#96[flagged]
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Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
#97Thanks for this great example of how much metadata can work against the person generating it. And I also want to thank the author for the wiki regarding the identification of the MUA by the Message-ID, that was a nice new detail I didn't know :)
Yeah, a pass with some exif scrubbing software would've gone a long way here. They probably just don't care though because not doing so doesn't really risk anything.
Anyone sophisticated enough to even look at the exif data is not a good mark.
Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
#98Kazakh names are typically unique planet-wide. There is a very, very low chance of there being another person with the same name. Chances of finding another person with the same name and the same year of birth are practically zero. Edit: Seems like this particular combination is not unique after all. Found quite a few people of the same name. Perhaps they chose a victim which can't be found trivially.
Though the name Aidana is Kazakh, the pictures would be more plausible for a member of the Russian minority in Kazakhstan (15% of the population according to Wikipedia). The article doesn't reveal where those pictures were stolen from, does it? And the voice? Typical spam call centre voice ... Philippines?
Sounds clearly Russian to me. Russian spoken in Yoshkar-Ola I guess.
Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to be somewhat mean to telemarketers, until I learned that some of them are prison laborers - getting paid pennies per hour to work in a prison call center. That already feels morally un-great, and messing with them further no longer felt like something I could justify.
I agree, and I feel like that goes for everything in general. It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief. Even the telemarketer, as you point out, doesn't want to be there (or even if they do, they may just be there because they have no better options and need to put food on the table). In life, there are…
>It's like people who get mad at customer service people
Except the customer service people willingly accept a job to act as an in-between so that any appropriate anger at a company is directed at an employee. To what extent do companies purposefully make use of this to prevent outrage directed at them? Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue?
At what point does being kind shift into a sort of pacifist mindset, that while great if everyone used it, creates fertile ground for far worse approaches to human relationships to flourish and spread, leading to the quality of the average approach to human relationships declining?
Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing that really stuck with me from the show The Good Place . The premise is that getting into heaven is a points-based system. You get points for doing good things, loose them for doing bad things, and when you die, if you have enough points, you go to heaven. Spoilers for season 3 ahead Used to be, for hundreds of years, you'd go visit your mom for her birthday. You'd be walking down the lane and see some wild…
I guess that show has been over for nearly 5 years, but it might still be a good idea to spoiler this reveal for folks who haven't gotten around to it so you don't lose 3 points.
Freezes; looks around Hackernews...
Wait a minute... THIS is The Bad Place!!!
Seriously though, I was super-embarrassed a year or two ago, when I received a phone call and quickly became convinced that some scammer had a hold of me.
I began questioning the poor lady on the phone and she gamely answered all my questions: location, company, including spelling her name and pronouncing it entirely differently. Many answers were quite vague and not satisfying to me at the time. But cold callers will absolutely hang up on that type of treatment!
My ultimate question was asking if she was safe or being trafficked or captive or something, because I noticed there was a dog barking in the background. And she must've been WFH.
Only after I wrote up a detailed play by play of the call and frantically reported it to several of my colleagues,
It turned out to be a totally legitimate call and somebody had authorized the marketing campaign. She just had so little information, she was unable to answer me adequately. I was so embarrassed I can't even tell you.