I am being catfished right now!

[qualitychat]

I received a friend request on Facebook just now. This is definitely someone catfishing me. He comes from Austin, Texas but has pigeon English. He is a Marine Engineer living in Sweden. He does a very dangerous job. He is a nice looking man, he has sent me a photo. He tragically lost his wife 5 years ago due to medical negligence. Am I wrong in stringing him alone?

Please don’t fight.

There is plenty of widowed American surgeons in Sweden to go around.

😀

@ChanelNo19EDT , re Tinder Swindler, I was frankly amazed that any evidently reasonably intelligent woman would go off in a private plane with someone she’d only just met!

Just goes to show that normally intelligent people can be unbelievably stupid. Perhaps especially when seduced by what looks like serious money and a ‘jet set’ lifestyle.

This one was in South Africa. Apparently. He's gone now anyway, my total lack of interest must have put him off. 😁

Absolutely please don't respond to the "gentleman". It's a total scam and happens all the time. Handsome man, often a US military office, bad spelling and grammar .... at your peril!! He'll be asking for money pretty soon.

Pretty sure OP knows that

You might want to read the thread. We all know.

Check out the story of Paolo Macchiarini https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/celebrity-surgeon-nbc-news-producer-scam

Since then he has been sent to jail. It turns out he was a scientific fraud who operated unethically on patients, as well a romance fraud.

No! Poor OP.

Hey girl, I hadn't realised you were stringing him along, you're braver than me, these people scare me. Be careful because they can be nasty, I've seen a few docs on UK TV and it seems there are no lengths. Have your fun and I applaud you, but be careful, these people are soulness criminals. Respect 🤘

I hate scammers. I’ve spent a good few hours stringing them along. My view is whilst I know what they are up to its better they engage with me than someone else who falls for it.

my favourite was the one who needed me to do things on my pc, I told him it was upstairs and could he wait whilst I Did the stuff he asked for. I did a fair bit of tidying, dusting, putting out the bins while popping back and asking him if he was still there and saying things like you won’t go will you as I really need you to help me.

in the end and I got bored and told him I knew exactly what he was up to and I’d been scamming him and he was very rude and I just laughed and he hung up, think it was a good two hours.

For the sheer crack, tell him you have to help a friend out with a big loan, platonic connection you made (also on-line) who has a sick child and no medical insurance. You might feel the pinch, but it's what your conscience is telling you to do.

😂. But he’s mine. The tats, the kitten, the cuddly toys. He’s just perfect 🙄

YABU just for saying 'Pidgeon' English it's Pidgin English.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 😬

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

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.

~~

... 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.

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 🤣🤣🤣😍

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