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My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

bentasker.co.uk

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Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#141

Post by pavel_lishin »

xp84 wrote: post #118
pavel_lishin wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

It's odd to me that people feel worse about unpleasant things happening specifically to convicted felons than to the general public. If you were being mean to a random jerk, and then he pointed out "By the way, I roughed up my wife last night" would you feel more bad about being mean? But you'd feel worse if it turned out he was doing time for that same crime? Note: I know that there could be people truly wrongfully…

> being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment

No, but it sure smells like slavery.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#142

Post by LoganDark »

inimino wrote: post #139
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.

I await the day where the companionship models are actually as good at creative writing as even ChatGPT. Of course if they're ever as good as a real person (the holy grail) then I'll be very happy, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#143

Post by bufferoverflow »

kgeist wrote: post #128
H8crilA wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Prigozhin visited one of our prisons once; that’s the only violence there is. The paganism is not Slavic, it's Uralic. Local indigenous people are related to the Finns.

"Prigozhin visited one of our prisons once; that’s the only violence there is".

No, it's not.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#144

Post by thaumasiotes »

Aspos wrote: post #138
thaumasiotes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

> Typically names consist of 1-5 elements which can be combined arbitrarily.

Out of curiosity, are those elements meaningful or just pure sounds?

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#145

Post by Aspos »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #144
Aspos wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> Typically names consist of 1-5 elements which can be combined arbitrarily. Out of curiosity, are those elements meaningful or just pure sounds?

Yes, they are meaningful. For example: Adjective + some natural phenomena + some flower = girl name.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#148

Post by rawgabbit »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #134
rawgabbit wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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 .

Eventually I got someone’s attention although I had to through five different people. Somebody did the right thing after I became loud.

I termed it performing as I was deliberately trying to draw attention to myself from the other passengers.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#149

Post by dang »

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]

Nationalistic flamewars are not allowed on Hacker News. No more of this, please, regardless of which nation you have a problem with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#150

Post by lurk2 »

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.

I saw this happen a few times where I used to work. The one instance that I remember was an older pensioner and a Filipina woman in her 30s. She met him in our city and eventually convinced him to move back to the Philippines with her. He used his pension to build her family a house for them all to live in. Once the house was finished, they locked him out of it and threatened to call the police if he didn't leave. This guy was in a wheelchair and didn't know how to read. What struck me was how nice he was - he wasn't at all bitter when he was describing what happened, and was extremely polite to everyone in the office.

I guess they look for people like that.

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