People scammed by online dating

[Lace Neil Singer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...n_1959219.html

I've read a lot of similar stories in magazines and it always amazes me about how people could be so stupid. I wouldn't even give a long term friend that amount of money (considering I had it in the first place! XD), yet these women are cheerfully handing over large sums of money to someone they've never even met, just cuz of a sob story spun out.

[Rapscallion]

Huh. I thought only blokes were daft enough to fall for that.

Rapscallion

[crashhelmet]

I got hit with one in early December, but I didn't fall victim to it. It was the classic Nigerian scam.

I started talking with this woman who was supposedly here in Vegas. The profile had pictures of a woman here in Vegas and their profile mentioned some local places. Everything seemed legit. IN the 2nd or 3rd email back and forth she mentioned that she was flying to Nigeria the next day to settle her late Father's real estate transactions. I didn't block her at first because I wanted to get information to forward on to 419eater.com. She spent the next month trying to convince me that she was trapped in Nigeria, unable to pay the taxes on the transactions. I did a reverse look up of the images she posted and found they belonged to a girl in Kansas.

Looking around the various sites, you find a large number of fake profiles. In some cases, they're using pictures of well known porn stars trying to lure the idiot men in. A friend of mine was telling me she's seeing them from men posing as bi / lesbian women, trying to get them to trade pictures.

[Mytical]

As I posted in the other thread I started, got one claiming to have 10.5 million they wanted to pass through my bank account . Yeah..I was born yesterday.

[TheHuckster]

Back when I was using online dating, I had a couple of these, too... that was, what, 7 years ago? One was especially rude to me, since after I "hesitated" (I had no intention of giving this idiot any money, but I had fun leading him or her on) she started calling me stupid for even thinking of "abandoning" her and that after I rescue her, she'd never let me go... to which I say, "Of course! Promising me you'll be a clingy girlfriend REALLY helps you cause."

I can't believe the Nigerian scam still works. The news about the scam seems quite ubiquitous now, but I guess it comes down to what Barnum said about suckers...

[Lace Neil Singer]

"Hello. I am Nigerian royalty, and I need you to send me money. Please ignore the fact that I cannot spell Nigerian or royalty". XD

[Mr Hero]

This makes me think. What would happen if you offered them the email address tied to your paypal account?

[bara]

I provided a link to the FBI once.. interestingly since then I have not received any more such offers...

[Skunkle]

I get these a lot. Nigerian scams of all kinds. I got one romance scammer who gave herself the name "Alien Hanson." I had another where the title of the email was "I AM INTERESTED IN MARRIAGE." That one was a guy who talked as though I was female - that's your first clue that it's a crock of crap: he's obviously not sending it to YOU, he's sending it to SOMEBODY. I also commonly get emails from people offering loans; usually they contain something to the effect of, "WOULD YOU LIKE A LOAN IF SO NAME,NUMBER,COUNTRY,AMOUNT THANK YOU" or similar. Scammers all-around are easy-to-spot. It's sad, though, that people still fall for them.

There are a couple of relatively recent scams going around, too, and I've gotten both of these. Before I mention these, just in case anyone here doesn't know, Western Union is the scammer ATM; they nearly always have marks use this to send them money since it can't be faked, while scammers nearly always send money to the scammee by money order or cashier's check, which CAN be faked. (And the bank will cash these!)

The first are people saying they're hiring secret shoppers. They'll send you a cashier's check (apparently, these can be faked pretty well), usually for around $500, and then they'll tell you where to go spend it and you write a review of the service. If you talk to them long enough, they'll tell you that the first place they want you to review is.... yep... a Western Union office! Of course, you have to use their services to be able to review them, so you Western Union the $500 back to the scammer. And a few weeks later, the check bounces. You're down $500 and the scammer is up $500.

The other one I'm sure Fratching users can have loads of fun with isn't African. Anyone gotten the tech support call from Windows (not Microsoft, but WINDOWS) saying that the worldwide server shows that your computer is trafficking in viruses? (These are indeed coming from India!)

[Lace Neil Singer]

I once got a scam email pretending to be from HSBC, asking me for my account number and PIN to verify my account. Two problems with that; firstly, a bank doesn't need your PIN to access your account, just like a forum admin doesn't need your password; second, I don't fucking well bank with HSBC! XD I didn't bother replying, just went to the offical HSBC website and forwarded the spam email to their contacts email.

[wolfie]

The other one I'm sure Fratching users can have loads of fun with isn't African. Anyone gotten the tech support call from Windows (not Microsoft, but WINDOWS) saying that the worldwide server shows that your computer is trafficking in viruses? (These are indeed coming from India!)

I got a few of that, but they stopped after I was insistent on the answer to ONE question (that they kept trying to "dance around") - what version of Windows am I running?

Obviously, any LEGITIMATE entity receiving "HELP!" messages from a Windows computer would have access to the contents of the messages, and a VERY simple thing to include (and extremely useful for diagnostic purposes) would be the version of Windows involved (including the service pack status). Scammers had absolutely no idea which version of Windows I was running.