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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

#101

Post by mschuster91 »

whoisstan wrote: post #53
mschuster91 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scammer Payback's videos always include footage from the surveillance cameras. At least the scammers he and his crew target don't use slavery - that's more of a problem in Burma/Myanmar, not in India where many tech scammers are.

Didn't know, are they individuals working independently with some 'services' to provide targets/money laundering or are they part of organized crime or payroll? I am curious in the support structures they are embedded in.

SP gives tales on that in pretty much every video. It's usually messenger apps where the coordination happens - scammers share and sell lists of leads, marks and mules, with different prices for "verified susceptible" targets, there's regional groups (even on Facebook lol) where scam ringleaders and potential agents meet, and yes there's payroll and even legit shift work.

In the worst cases, legitimate companies sublet their office space to scammers - the day shift are regular callcenter employees that do fully legitimate consulting/support/outsourcing stuff, and in the night the scammer crews roll in. Utterly absurd to watch, and police usually doesn't do shit because they're paid off.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#102

Post by alecmg »

Aspos wrote: post #98
bloak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

nothing like Russian, South Asian maybe

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#103

Post by SkyBelow »

Mistletoe wrote: post #93
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 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.

The cynic in me is wondering if this is them attempting to swap to another tactic to establish a different relationship with the same end goal.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#104

Post by saghm »

Scoundreller wrote: post #80
inetknght wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once they can’t find any true victims in a reasonable amount of time, the industry will disappear You're wasting more of your time than theirs. Think of it, you've already got your own answer. This is a whole industry and that implies people that work full time. How much time do you spend on this? Have you spent your whole day optimizing your workflow and answers to get an optimal response? Because they most certai…

Finding out how to keep them on the line longer is part of the fun.

That just makes it seem like you're also exploiting the people who are forced into this, only for a different motive than the ones who forced them into it in the first place. Maybe there's a better way to entertain yourself than this?

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#105

Post by AStonesThrow »

Growing up in the cold war, we always heard of "Mail order brides from Russia".

In 2008 I had a disastrous international romance that began on an MMORPG.

It was then that I learned that mail order bride companies often mediated between prospective girlfriends and the men overseas, and they actually protected both sides from scams or utter heartbreak. They made secure matches if they were reputable and they were able to arrange romances, or visas, immigration or whatever was being looked for.

Their clients alone would never have the resources to research and verify and vet one another.

It may have been a backpage, craigslist, back alley sort of operation, but perhaps sometimes it actually worked?

Hail Melania

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#106

Post by andrei_says_ »

psadauskas wrote: post #72
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…

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 meat industry, pretend we don’t witness the ongoing ecocide and destruction of our only biosphere.

That’s before the daily servings of doom via our doom-monetizing, amygdala-destroying media outlets.

Such levels of ongoing denial and desentization impact us to the point that we live in an increasingly unhealthy state of mass psychosis. We are all freaking out internally, pretending that all is OK externally.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#107

Post by chatmasta »

gus_massa wrote: post #24
_tk_ wrote: post #8

I've never quite understood this sort of anti-scammer content and what its appeal is to readers. There are a million YouTube videos and other articles out there that explain, analyze, as well as mock[1] and denigrate scammers - who are essentially modern day slaves [2]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWzz3NeDz3E [2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-02/human-trafficking-vie...

Hi from Argentina! Yesterday someone tried to hack my WhatsApp. He call me and said something like: > Hello! I'm from phone company $Name. Someone tried to register your WhatsApp number form $Another_city. We are calling to confirm because otherwise we will have to block your phone line with $Name. The first problem was that $Name was not my phone company. I though it was a " change company " call that is worse than…

Depending on group privacy, they may be able to identify members without joining it (i.e. no need to hack someone else in the group).

I haven’t kept up on WhatsApp research but at some point this was true - same goes for online status and avatars. I have those set to “nobody” and “default.”

WhatsApp makes it way too easy to go from “phone number” to “real person online at X, Y, Z hours.”

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#109

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

guappa wrote: post #19
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 think at this point pig butchering is so famous that if you fall for it you'd fall for any scam.

I have literally never heard of it before this thread.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#110

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

throwme0827349 wrote: post #92
chatmasta wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mad…

It's probably more that most Americans typically have very little for breakfast.

Around here, cornbread and sausage gravy, coffee (milk or tea for my teenager) is a not-uncommon Saturday breakfast. I think I made a variety of muffins last weekend. Or home-made corned beef hash with scrambled eggs, etc. You get the idea.

OTOH, during the week it's probably something simple like a sausage patty on a toasted English muffin, maybe with a scrambled egg (my version of a McMuffin). Or cereal if I'm not feeling it.

I have had Caesar and other salads for breakfast. Salads are really delicious when you don't want a heavy meal and they're quick and easy to make.

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