Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

bentasker.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 172 posts

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#131

Post by citizenpaul »

These scams are sad and horrible.

I find it hard not to put some blame on the victim though. At the end of the day you are are responsible for watching out for yourself. When I look at the pictures of these people scammed. They are most often unattractive and unaccomplished people that believe suddenly a good looking international fashion model or a Harvard Doctor is inexplicably interested in them.

I know its kinda sad but you have to have SOME idea of where you fall in the game of life and if something that much of an outlier comes along. You have got to be a little suspicious that they would really be interested in a romantic relationship with you.

You cannot protect someone that has allowed this level of delusion to be their real world view is my point. "Protecting" these people from themselves essentially requires complete submission and removal of free will from at least some part of the population by force.

I've watched the documentaries and most of the people after the fact admit that they basically did it to themselves. Nothing anyone could have done would have changed the outcome because they wanted it that way until it was too late.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#132

Post by rawgabbit »

derefr wrote: post #116
EvanAnderson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped trying to mess with them and string them along after I heard about this.

I send them messages written in Khmer asking if they need help. (Most of the victims are not themselves Cambodian and cannot read this. But the messages are not for them; they're to spook their captors.)

The news reports I see said most of the scam centers are in Myanmar run by Chinese gangs. The victims are mostly Chinese, but there are reports of Japanese, Kenyans and many other nationalities being trafficked. They are forced to work 18 hours a day and tasered when they don't meet their quota.

Even a famous Chinese actor was tricked and trafficked. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/china/china-actor-thailand-sc...

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#133

Post by gambiting »

xp84 wrote: post #127
gambiting wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment. The problem I have with this is that last time I checked, nearly all sentences for people going to prison are incarceration, not incarceration+forced labour. It's the same as people cheering up prison rape because "they deserve it" or "if they don't like it, they should just stop committing crimes". Again, no one is…

> It's the same as people cheering up prison rape Respectfully, no it's not. Our society does in theory, and should, recognize a universal right to not be raped. It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of, with the possible exception of the Royal Family. Though I understand most of their income comes from their historical ownership of vast lands, which is slightly differe…

>>Respectfully, no it's not.

Alright, maybe the comparison took it too far but I hope you see my point - the sentence is imprisonment, not imprisonment+X.

>>It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of

Nonsense - how about the ill and the disabled? Why do we take care of them even if they don't work? Unless when you say "our society" you mean some society that doesn't have that - but then I can't possibly know where you live.

>>Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies?

Uhm....almost every developed country offers some kind of socialized housing and food stamps if you need them?

>>I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.

It's not their right - it's ours. We lock them up and they should stay locked up. They should sit in prison all day not because it's their privilege to be sitting around all day bored, but because it's our privilege to walk streets free of criminals - we want them there.

Also observe how even I acknowledged that prisoners could be used for work - any kind of public work where they aren't a danger to society is fine with me. But the moment you introduce a profit motive you are creating breeding ground for corruption and incentives which have absolutely nothing to do with justice.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#134

Post by pavel_lishin »

rawgabbit wrote: post #130
pocketarc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief. " I used to believe this. But I have since changed my mind. Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for. A couple years ago, I…

> Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for.

And how much choice do those reps have? Their choice is "follow the playbook" or "go out and find a new job".

It sounds like you yelled at someone who was not responsible for your original issue. You weren't performing. You were being.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#135

Post by pavel_lishin »

SkyBelow wrote: post #99
pocketarc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

My feelings of pity towards the people being literally enslaved don't mean I don't want the scams to stop, or for the people to be liberated.

It just means I don't scream profanities at someone who had their passport stolen.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#136

Post by thaumasiotes »

bloak wrote: post #95
Aspos wrote: post #87

Kazakh 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?

> The article doesn't reveal where those pictures were stolen from, does it?

It says they're taken from the Instagram account of "a Russian personal trainer".

I doubt the author is making an ethnic distinction between European Russians and Turkic Kazakhs, so the woman is probably identifiably located inside Russia.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#137

Post by dullcrisp »

H8crilA wrote: post #120
kgeist wrote: post #86

Yoshkar-Ola, Russia is mentioned there. I'm from Yoshkar-Ola. This kind of scam business exists here at least since the early 2000s. We were once called the capital of such scam business in Russia. I didn't know it's still a thing. One of my acquaintances worked there in around 2005-2007. It was mostly students renting an appartment, rows of PCs. He left right before they were raided by police. Some British individua…

[flagged]

Bit rude but okay

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#138

Post by Aspos »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #119
Aspos wrote: post #87

Kazakh 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.

> Kazakh names are typically unique planet-wide. Really? What kind of structure do their names have? I think even cultures that used full-sentence names tended to have some conventional ones. And certain name ideas are very common cross-culturally, as witness Bogdan / Nathaniel / Theodore (and older Diodorus / Apollodorus / Herodotus / etc) / Dieudonné / Atallah... Going to something I know better, Chinese names can…

There are quite a few pre-Islamic taboos some of which persist to this day. For example, can't give a child a name of a living person parents know of. This of course includes extended family, friends and even acquaintances. This restriction alone enforces creative naming.

Typically names consist of 1-5 elements which can be combined arbitrarily. There are literally thousands of such elements though.

Last name often is a first name of an ancestor a few generations deep and it is likely to be unique too.

So as a result first+last name combinations are quite unique.

Urbanization is changing all this of course but some traditions are still strong. In my entire life I've met just 3 people with the same first name as mine.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#139

Post by inimino »

danielvf wrote: post #11

One warning, this scam, with it's fast timeline and request for funds to be sent to the girlfriend is a classic, but modern scams can be quite different than this. "pig butchering" scams can run for months of contact with no requests for money, and then instead of asking for money, the user "invests" into what appear initialy to be profitable investments alongside the scammer.

And in case it isn't obvious, with AI "companionship" models and such, this is about to get a lot worse as the cost of the string-along goes to zero.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#140

Post by an_aparallel »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #106
psadauskas wrote: post #72

Earlier 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…

In her book Medicine Stories, Aurora Morales speaks of the impact our participatory existence in an unjust world has on us. We have to harden our hearts in order to walk by the unhoused, harden our hearts to buy stuff me know is produced by slavery, pretend we don’t see the extortionist, your-money-or-your-life nature of industrialized health services, harden our hearts to the slaughter of billions of animals for the…

Thanks for bringing this up, sums up how I feel about life. And underlines one of my biggest realisations of recent times: depression is a valid/natural response to helplessness and a world of injustice...
Post reply on HN