While connecting with friends from high school on Facebook, I came across one guy who apparently fell for this hook, line & sinker… he sent tens of thousands of dollars up front to a woman from Manila, had a years-long email- and phone-relationship with her, eventually paid for her to move to the US so they could be married, and she ended up dumping him like a cold fish once she got here. He was a little bitter.
A romance scam forum? I didn’t even know such places existed. Can you link to one? Or maybe just provide the name of one?
Gosh, there are tons. I don’t remember the names of my two old favorites. My favorite part(s) were always the “Don’t let anyone tell you that you are stupid” posts and the time and effort involved in warning others about “Jeff Stevens”, the muscular 25 year old male model in the photos - as if he were an actual threat.
Googling romance scam forums brings up a lot of them.
Sure thing. Just send me your social security number, your date of birth, your mother’s maiden name, and the name of your bank.
Pffft! I wish I had a nickel for every guy I’ve counseled against falling for schemes like these in my years of working in HR. I spent a lot of time working in the oil industry. Some of the less educated field workers lead the kind of life that doesn’t allow them to court a woman in the traditional sense. When you are traveling all over the country, working on a rig site or an off-shore platform for months at a time, you amass a lot of money and precious little sense. Contact with women is either hookers or the internet. Hookers are fine for some, but those regular joes who would like a wife and family see these kind of ads (which is, of course, what they are) as the answer to a prayer.
The guys would come into my office all smiles looking for a loan on their 401k or an advance on their paycheck or asking how to go about transfering funds overseas so that they could bring Mei or Sasha or Ashanti over from Taiwan or Odessa or Chad. I hated having to burst their bubble by showing them that their ‘sweetheart’ was nothing but an internet scam, but I’ve hated it even more if they’d thrown away their money.
There are lonely people out there, sadly, who want to be seduced by the possibilities of a situation like this. Makes my heart break a little for all of them.
On a dating website, I received a message from a man purporting to be Army General John Campbell, complete with pictures. Since I did not believe this for an instant, I reported him (or her, who the heck knows?)
A man I’ve known since childhood recently confided in me about the young Filipina woman he has been emailing and chatting with, and who wants to move to the US and love him long time. Lucky for me, I wasn’t face to face with him when he told me because I am sure my face went like this in quick succession:
:dubious::dubious::eek::eek:
I wonder what % of hot women on those sites are trolls or scams.
99.44%.
Usually the scams: 1.) have only one picture 2.) feature a picture that is professionally done 3.) feature a girl that is extremely hot, in a sexually aggressive way 4.) have language used to write the profile that is remarkably crude and broken; not at all the type of English that even a high-school educated person would use 5) show the age range for the men they are interested in always skewed towards the older crowd and it always runs very high, usually to elderly levels.
Of course, not all follow this pattern but if you see a profile that does, it’s a scam.
There was a show called “To Catch a Scammer” and they profiled some of this. Also some women are hooked in by profiles of good looking men.
I’ve read about some guys who make a point of engaging these scammers and string them along to get them to waste time and hopefully not be able to scam others.
Well, I wouldn’t say the text in this particular example here in the OP is remarkably crude and broken. It has a couple of relatively minor ungrammatical points and is slightly awkward in some places. It could have been written by your average, native-English speaking college freshman.
However, the scammers clearly have used this text because it casts a wide net. The “woman” doesn’t really say anything pointed about her personality one way or another. She doesn’t say she’s a fundamentalist Christian or a die-hard atheist; she’s neither a party animal nor an introvert; neither a Yankee nor a Red Sox fan; neither a conformist nor a free-thinker. She’s a tabla rasa upon which the scam’s target can project whatever type of woman he wants the model in the photo to be. This allows for the maximum number of potential victims possible, since none of them will find anything objectionable about her “personality.”
Her net has some holes. She lost me with Christian, non-drinker and coy about wanting children. Plus, she’s a bit plain for my tastes. I can only imagine the sad state of her knees.
I’ll bet her mouth is out of warranty, too.
Yeah I may have chosen a not-so-particularly illustrative example of the speech I encounter all the time on these sites. This particular excerpt was just the first one I encountered when I decided to post this thread. I’ll come back with better examples.
Also true of women.
To answer the OP, the reason why people fall for these scams is not idiocy, but gullibility. Admittedly, there is a fine line between.
If a stranger called you and said if you gave them a credit card number, they would send you some money, would you do it?
Apparently, a lot of people would. A lot. Enough people to support a very profitable industry doing exactly that.
Here’s the audio of a call I received today.
I get several of these each week. (Hey, some people collect ceramic frogs; I collect scams.) Even though my number should be in the scammer’s WTF/dead end list by now, they feel that the remote chance that I might break down and fall for this is worth the extremely low cost of the robocall and the lowly-paid operator in India. (Who’s more gullible, the victim of the call or the operator who was promised untold riches?)
Here’s the audio of a call I received today.
Link fixed. Damn edit window.
Right, which is exactly what I said in my OP.
So let’s delete posts #2 thru #37. 
Well what I said was who could be so gullible as to fall for these scams. So it was never in doubt that gullibility was to blame here, just who the people were that could attain such high levels of it. Idiocy was never mentioned anywhere.