The average man may have ‘more’ financial power (according to some feminists) and physical power, but the average middle class woman is perceived as non threatening around people and more trustworthy with random strangers which is a major advantage if trying to gain from others easily.
Watching a video on YouTube titled ‘Asking 100 Guys For Sex’, it seems that a lot were willing to go with a young attractive woman without actually knowing who she is or what her true intentions were as opposed to vice versa where no one went with the guy. Now for truly malicious criminals, a young white woman is the least suspicious individual and therefore the best decoy.
Even with this social advantage, I rarely hear of women being used like this. However, do you personally know of a story where criminals have lured someone in with an attractive woman?
There’s numerous cases of women being used as bait for robberies via Craigslist. Go to some location for sex, get shaken down or beaten by a couple of dudes waiting with her.
More benignly, there’s a reason why there’s a lot of pretty young women in sales, especially stuff like working kiosks or tables trying to attract passing foot traffic. Not a crime but definitely social engineering.
Related to kferr’s joke, there was a series of crimes that happened several years back (that I couldn’t google up) where a couple of attractive young women on the beach would strip nude in one of those public “sand rinsing” showers and start playing around with each other–while their accomplice would steal wallets and purses from the distracted beachgoer’s blankets.
A local woman got prosecuted for running one of those ‘fortuneteller’ operations out of her home – palm readings, sure, but apparently her specialty was telling people that they were suffering bad luck because of a cursed item. No, tossing the cursed item aside is no good; you need to give it to someone who can cleanse it.
By coincidence, she is the person who can so cleanse it; also by coincidence, the cursed item would turn out to be “a diamond ring” or “money”.
That’s interesting but doesn’t really line up with the OP, which is about using a sexually attractive woman as bait. The scam you describe could be, and indeed is, also run by men.
Well, the OP also said the average middle-class woman is perceived as nonthreatening and trustworthy – adding that a young white woman is the least suspicious individual before asking about criminals luring someone in with an attractive woman. So I figured there was no harm in erring on the side of mentioning it.
This technique has been around a loooong time. Google “honey trap espionage” for many examples. It’s certainly not limited to espionage, but adding that to the search string helps weed out those cases that don’t exactly fit the OP, as when someone uses the technique to try to catch a significant other in infidelity.
I think you’re making a peculiar reading of things here. It’s not news nor much debatable that men are, as a class, pretty stupid about sex and will chase an evidently willing POA right off a cliff. Women might not be a lot smarter about men, but I think they are generally far more wary and cautious about rushing off to bed with a stranger.
It was the S.C.U.M. Manifesto that listed the endless disgusting things a man would do (wade through a mile of shit, swim though a river of vomit, etc.) “if he thought friendly pussy was on the other side.” Never found much general reason to disagree.
So using attractive women as bait, whether the scam is run by the woman, a woman or a man, is something that probably goes back to Cro-Magnon times.
There was a story on a young, attractive, patriotic woman in WWII.
Her assignment was to “fall in love” with specific targets and use various forms of “pillow talk” for info.
The US got the intell, the targets got some great sex.
Top one - a fellow at the (Vichy) French embassy - the safe contained the code books for the Ultra machine.
She was given barbiturates for the night guard and his mastiff. A professional safecracker was obtained from a prison.
But no, young attractive women would NEVER use their looks for advantage…
This isn’t a “scam” at all, but when I was in central Europe a decade ago as part of a college overseas trip with some other students and some Europe-based staff, it was my job to interview some immigrants from China (I was the only person who spoke Mandarin). I was traveling with a woman companion who was around my age. It was mentioned by her that a woman might be perceived as less ‘threatening’ than a man would be, since many of these Chinese immigrants were very suspicious and guarded folks, and the presence of a woman might put them more at ease.
So yes, there are definitely situations in which a woman has a social advantage or could be used for social-engineering advantage.
The ABC show What Would You Do? always runs scenarios where people will accept criminal activity when women do it, but become suspicious when men do it.