I am being catfished right now!

You’ve all inspired me I’m almost willing for a scammer to call me 😂

Has anyone tried the

"I need £100 to unlock my account because I need to pay the solicitor.Send it now and tomorrow I'll send you your £5000." line?

I get a lot of phone calls from "Three the mobile network" at the moment, which is funny as I left them a number of years ago.

So far I have:

• Answered every question in German, reciting a Christmas poem I had to learn yonks ago
• Pretended I only spoke German or French
• And last week, told a guy my company had taken over my contract, but he could talk to head office, would he like the number? Of course he did, so I gave him the Action Fraud number

The last time I had the "Yeah, we heard you were involved in an accident" scam I proceeded to tell them that I was. The explained how I was just outside, minding the chickens when this strange carriage came along, without any horses. There was this strange woman atop with her sons. After going to the pharmacy she started the vehicle again, I fell over and injured myself.*
By that time he clocked I was telling him a story and hung up, strangely no call since.

But the longer these scammers stay on the phone with me, the less they have to really scam someone else.

*Loosely based on the first "long distance" car journey done by Bertha Benz in 1886(ish)

I do this (also was banned by DH from posting anything about DC’s from a very early age - rather as DBiL banned DSis from doing the same with DN, both having been on work-related courses about how people can clone your ID in minutes by even the most oblique references/innocent pics on SM), so do not have this issue in FB. I did, however get them in X/Twitter because I foolishly opted to put a real photo up for a week. Reverted to a landscape now, but the bot/scammer algorithms are totally geared towards public profiles with female pics.

Omg, fully LOL 😂😂😂

We had someone call and say they found a rental car on the border of Mexico with blood, guns and drugs in it and it had been rented in my husbands name. Multiple “detectives” on the call. I think they claimed to be Texas rangers.

😂💀

Love that !! 😀

For those of you concerned about the Nigerian question and that we are unfairly targeting them with these accusations of endemic fraud, I just thought I'd mention that I started working for a major high street bank in the late 1970's. Even then, we were completely banned from opening accounts or allowing any transactions for any person or organisation in or from Nigeria. So it's been going on for quite a while.

A number of years ago I received a call after changing my number due to malicious calls (a story for another day ). We inherited Miss Gregory’s previous number. I had a phone call one day for Miss Gregory. I didn’t have anything on that day so decided to play along. After about 30 minutes, of this conversation where I had put them “on hold” infront of the radio, talked rubbish etc I was called Miss Gregory again I said….,, “Yes I DO miss Gregory, but please don’t tell anyone, he really annoyed me so I pushed him down the stairs, I miss him so much I wish I didn’t kill him” then I hung up 😳

@Garlickit Yeah I do get that. I was more referring to the guy who lost 1.2 million. When you're that rich, it seems odd you don't have advisors to manage your money etc

They're convinced they're in some kind of emergency. The journalist telling her story describes how the scammers manipulated her state of mind - they kept her on the phone for five hours, talking to different team members - and preyed on fears for her toddler's safety.

There's only one thing I would definitely have done differently: she accepted a callback from the financial authority's switchboard number. I would have called it myself. A hacker could still re-route an outgoing call but, if you've been that badly compromised, you're probably fucked either way.

The scammers did tell her she'd been hacked, though, so maybe I'd have lost faith in my simple check by that point!

I've had an instagram follow request from Martin Kemp, Owen Wilson and Robbie Williams this week, which is strange because I don't follow any of the 'real' celeb accounts. Out of interest I accepted Robbie and he instantly responded with 'my dear fan, you are quite the lovely, which of my works would you say is your big fan?' so it's definitely the real RW. When I declined to answer, he followed up with ??? after which I blocked him.

I'd be interested to know what financial help Robbie Williams needs. If you're reading Rob, lend me a tenner til payday and I'll tell which of your works is my big fan.

Yeah this is bit weird- you'd think they have lawyers and financial managers who sort this out and validate those kinds of transactions. If you can "lose" 1.2 million- surely you have lawyers to check stuff first???

Tell him you are a pre operative trans woman and as he is clearly very rich can he contribute to your go fund me to become a Real woman so you can be together

I just ask “why?” To every single comment question or comment these scammers make…most put phone down before 6th “why?”, though my record is 10 whys
I say nothing else, just “why?”
🤷🏼‍♀️

though I do fancy asking about their penguins in Swedish 🤣🤣🤣😍

... Although the reason for my negative net worth is that I took out a dodgy mortgage to get back on my feet post-divorce. Those mortgages might have been an above-board, widespread scam but they were a scam, which eventually led to tighter controls on secured lending.

The article @AliceOlive linked offers an answer to "Why do they fall for it?"

~~

It was my brother, the lawyer, who pointed out that what I had experienced sounded a lot like a coerced confession. “I read enough transcripts of bad interrogations in law school to understand that anyone can be convinced that they have a very narrow set of terrible options,” he said.

When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed. “If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.” And when you haven’t done anything wrong, the risk of cooperating feels minimal, he added. An innocent person thinks everything will get sorted out.

It also mattered that I was kept on the phone for so long. People start to break down cognitively after a few hours of interrogation. “At that point, they’re not thinking straight. They feel the need to put an end to the situation at all costs,” Kassin said.

~~

I just bought this book as a present after following her on Twitter . Very funny .

OMG! From that story, whose author lost $50k:
"When I did tell friends what had happened, it seemed like everyone had a horror story. One friend’s dad, a criminal-defense attorney, had been scammed out of $1.2 million. Another person I know, a real-estate developer, was duped into wiring $450,000 to someone posing as one of his contractors. Someone else knew a Wall Street executive who had been conned into draining her 401(k) by some guy she met at a bar."

This is one the few times I'm glad I have negative net worth 😬

He's no adonis, is he? Cut-and-paste fat, beardy bloke😃

Yes, I’ve done this as well. My aim is to string it out as long as possible if I can spare the time as while he’s trying his luck with me he’s not scamming someone else who might fall for it.

The last one who purported to be from my bank got very angry when I told him to get a proper job, called me a wankstain and said he was just emptying my account. He didn't get a penny though.

I watched a documentary about this called 'Fattening the Pig'
It was wild. It followed a young man who was trafficked to a compound in Cambodia and forced to interact day and night with western women with the aim of getting them to part with cash.

There was a scene where one of the guys was operating hundreds of profiles at a time. The devices; a phone for each profile, were lined up on stands in a row and he was moving between them.

The person running the operation was making a huge amount of money and using cult like tactics to motivate these pood trafficked men to keep working on women.

Its called a pig- fattening scheme.

OP if your choosing to interact, it's probably pointless and a waste of energy. It will also probably be stressing out some trafficked person who is trying to meet the target of some awful gang leader.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jw0s

🤣 I’ve been laughing to myself over the same thing

I win the Nigerian lottery several times a month.
I also get frequent emails from 'Brother Christopher who is a priest and cant access his inheritance without my help. He's also in Nigeria.
Occasionally the name changes but the inheritance is ways huge and all I have to do is send fifty quid to help whoever access it.
I'm sure there are as many decent people in Nigeria as there are in England. There are also just as many shitty people.
My mum is 84 and thankfully still has all her marbles. A Nigerian man emails her at least once a month . His English is particularly poor.