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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

#151

Post by lurk2 »

Teever wrote: post #85
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…

But the industry has a business model and if the margins are slim enough the model doesn't work and the industry collapses. Think about a drive through that serves three rushes in a day, people driving to work, people on theyr lunch break, and people driving home. If each rush is an hour long how many people would need to DDOS the drive through with frivolous complaints and time wasting bullshit like 'oh let me find…

I would have thought the chief limitation in an operation like this would be that your profits are (presumably) Pareto distributed, so 80% of profits come from 20% of victims. This would make the operation more like mining Bitcoin than serving lunches. One thing that supports your theory that the margins are slim, however, is that there are crime syndicates kidnapping people to work in these call centers. If the wages didn't represent a significant marginal cost, they wouldn't need to risk attracting international attention by kidnapping people in the first place.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#152

Post by lurk2 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #63
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 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 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.

Are you talking about people who have been convicted of a crime and are calling you at dinner to sell you something or conduct a survey, or about people in Southeast Asia who have been kidnapped and are being forced to run scams? I've heard of this happening in Southeast Asia, but not with actual convicts, only kidnapping victims.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#155

Post by shatsky »

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…

Yoshkar-Ola itself is a forgery, just google for its photos and name of that embankment street (no offence, just kidding, I even kinda like it, hope they didn't destroy some valuable authentic architecture to build it).

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#157

Post by xp84 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #141
xp84 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s the extreme stretch a certain lobby has been pushing. Even in deep blue California, where that was the marketing for Prop 6 last year, 55% of voters laughed that characterization off the ballot. Sure, it’s like slavery, except that you’re not born into it but rather you ended up in prison by choice, it’s fixed in term instead of for life, they by law can’t physically harm you, they can’t enslave your offspring, etc etc.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#158

Post by steve_adams_86 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #60
fmajid wrote: post #42

Earlier 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.

There is a video out there where a scammer gets scammed, and his reaction goes from fury to terror. I think it's because he'll be held accountable for the loss, and is likely working in horrible conditions. It's sad because this video was very popular entertainment on YouTube for a while.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#159

Post by bsenftner »

wheybags wrote: post #59
bsenftner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My antivirus blocked loading the site, identifying a trojan payload, using Russian text. That's as far as I went.

There's a message encouraging Russian visitors to not support the war in Ukraine. If your antivirus is flagging any Cyrillic text, that's a bit overzealous IMO.

No, there was a Trojan payload, like I said. Despite the social down voting, I'm giving the truth.

Re: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster

#160

Post by Teever »

lurk2 wrote: post #151
Teever wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the industry has a business model and if the margins are slim enough the model doesn't work and the industry collapses. Think about a drive through that serves three rushes in a day, people driving to work, people on theyr lunch break, and people driving home. If each rush is an hour long how many people would need to DDOS the drive through with frivolous complaints and time wasting bullshit like 'oh let me find…

I would have thought the chief limitation in an operation like this would be that your profits are (presumably) Pareto distributed, so 80% of profits come from 20% of victims. This would make the operation more like mining Bitcoin than serving lunches. One thing that supports your theory that the margins are slim, however, is that there are crime syndicates kidnapping people to work in these call centers. If the wage…

It may be like bitcoin mining in that sense but either way x% less time spent with a possible mark is x% less time to take their money.
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