Beware of the perfect gentleman
vice.com
vice.com
Earlier than that, it was also considered proper etiquette to ask before taking someone's photo.
There's been a huge culture shift and some of the outcomes are disheartening but quite predictable.
...little recourse other than to continuously report fake profiles across social media platforms
If they don't take down your fraudulent likeness or their efforts toward that end are a joke, hire a lawyer and put them in touch with the owners of the site.
Sure, let's implement these laws that essentially will be used for stiffening art, at least all these scammers (who already do illegal things) will start following the law, and these romance scams will stop /s.
This is like the gun control debate, but much worse. At least with gun control, it has strong ties to geographic boundaries, given that guns are physical objects, so I can see some decent arguments for why it (at least hypothetically) could work (e.g., Australia).
But with photos posted online, the locale is global internet, where everything is instantly reachable and replicable with pretty much zero marginal cost, from anywhere in the world. These proposals are imo peak idealism without much pragmatic thought applied at all.
Mind you, I am not saying "let's do nothing, things are all good." But some of the proposed "fixes" to this I've seen here are truly useless at best and harmful at worst.
> The women claimed to have met him on a dating app, social media platform, or a less-expected online space, like an app-based word or puzzle game (Words With Friends is popular with scammers)—anything with a chat feature. What the women didn’t know was that the 50-something fellow with the goatee who smiled back at them in photograph after photograph wasn’t the same person they were speaking with. Their charming lover was a scripted character used by gangs of overseas fakers to bilk cash from unsuspecting romantics, and Geras’ stolen photos were the bait.
The article says the man feared for his life because husbands of these women called him. Presumably these women are from the same country as this guy so my suggestion would've stopped most of those vectors of attack. I mean yeah if they gave their phone number in the chat of a puzzle game then the scammers could send whatever pictures they wanted but that's a much harder thing to pull off than scam someone on a dating app or with a fake social media profile
Most portraits have their background blurred so those wouldn't be a problem. Street photos can have the faces blurred. Why are we protecting sharing these street photos of random people anyway?
I have _never_ uploaded my photo "online" voluntarily, but still it was common to put your photo in many places that were easily reachable by the common public. My school published a yearbook with my photo, for example. Many journal papers I've published had my photo attached, starting at least from the 90s.
Some of these have been digitized and thus my photo is easily reachable for anyone who searches for my full name, without me ever voluntarily uploading it "online".
> Earlier than that, it was also considered proper etiquette to ask before taking someone's photo.
This much is still true, or can you imagine going around randomly flashing people with your phone on the street?
Actually I think this has improved over time. I'm far from a celebrity, but my photo is on the press -- and they never asked for permission. Nowadays, they do.
The other way my photo has made it online is pictures with friends and family, generally facebook.
Luckily, between that and my name being shared by several people in my country who are more comfortable with online persona's, and no one is actually going to find my image unless they're trying really hard to specifically target me.
Your point is a good one and I know I'm lucky in that respect. I very much miss the days when anonymity was a major value in online interactions.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if someone lives across the world and is doing all this impersonation online, what legal recourse does a lawyer have access to? Drag them to The Hague?
I’ve been in cases before where someone in a different continent is trying to impersonate or sink you, and I can say in my experience there’s little a Canadian lawyer could have done.
When was that? For those over 40, when they grew up there was no "online".
And if one was a kid or teenager growing up the the mid to late nineties, people had personal websites and online photos of themselves up regularly, and it wasn't considered much.
You didn't have regular snaps of your life, or pictures of the food you ate, like later, but you could well have your picture and nobody would consider it strange. Heck, even university professors and professionals of all kinds had personal and business pages with their photos on...
There were BBSs. But I don't think anyone would appreciate trying to upload a photo through a 300 baud modem.
But it's not the online kind we're discussing here, where upload pictures of yourself to the web was considered uncouth (as per the parent commenter), because it wasn't considered as good or bad at all, as it was just not a thing people could do at the time (not even BBS users were actually doing that, except perhaps in some incredibly rare cases where someone could get access to a scanner).
>For those over 40, when they grew up there was no "online".
If you accept the Internet became popular in '85-'95 [1], someone 40 today would have been 3yrs to 13yrs old in that span so right in the sweet spot of their formative years.
As others pointed out, prior to the Internet there were BBS's, message boards, forums like CompuServe, AOL, etc. which were its precursors and what was known as going 'online' at the time. I did intend that to be included in my meaning when I used the term.
Of course I'm speaking from personal experiences and your own may vary. :-)
[1] https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories....
Why did I know they are fake?
One, I'm not handsome, neither do I work in those high status companies, why did they reach out to me?
Two, they look more like models than software engineers. Completely bullshit.
Here's a VPN company advertising "a VPN server located in a region that offers cheaper games, in-app purchases, products, etc." and if other VPN providers don't explicitly advertise this benefit, they know some of their customers are using their product for that reason.
https://www.vpnunlimited.com/help/solutions/saving-with-regi...
And by sex I don't mean the copulation act, but just seeing very handsome and attractive people that trigger your primal mating desires, works in advertising when trying to convince people to buy something from you or give you something (a product, a service, an idea, their time, their money, their attention, their assistance, etc.)
It's why many recruiters, especially in tech, tend to be the attractive female type as it works well enough on the majority male demographic this career attracts.
And why most successful sales people, and to a large degree, managers who managed to climb 'the ladder', tend to be on the tall, athletic, attractive side.
This is completely anecdotal, but I've never ever seen conventionally short males in upper management in any company I worked at so far. It's as if it was a 'jocks club' and you needed the right physique to join.
It it the stereotype that Asians are good at STEM?
Not that I've ever done this. I always respect and obey the computer fraud and abuse act of 1986 vis a vis the section on unauthorized access to a computer system.
He didn't consider it unethical because "you'd have to be really really stupid to think that women are posting their face on a site like AFF".
I kinda thought exploiting the really stupid was still unethical, but his response was given that I worked in adtech, I wasn't really in a place to judge.
Which was hard to argue against, tbh, as I spent a lot of my time then either making popunders work again after Firefox released a new version that broke our old approach, or figuring out how to store our tracking data better.
But now that I've got a few years between me and adtech, I'm totally going to judge you hard, eug1505.
Isn’t there a huge ethical issue there?
> But now that I've got a few years between me and adtech, I'm totally going to judge you hard, eug1505.
I don’t want to put words in the other dude’s mouth, but I think he thinks so too.
I worked with someone (she was on the sales team) who looked like a model. Her mom was a model--go figure. So while unlikely, it does happen.
We had the near opposite experience. We were looking to hire a "Modelling and simulation developer" for Matlab. And some ladies would somehow only see the "modelling experience desired" part and ignore the other technical requirements and flood us with their portfolios of various photo shoots.
I'm sure the hiring guys hated it.
They are both very conventionally attractive people, but it's not their image that makes them good at their jobs per se, IMO it's having the confidence and charm of a person who has gone through life always being attractive.
If a less attractive person had that confidence, charm, charisma, whatever you call it - and some do - they would also be successful.
Can I push back against this? It’s toxic as fuck. Being a woman in tech blows. You can’t be pretty or you’re considered incompetent and shallow. You can’t be ugly or you’re treated poorly for that.
It’s a loose-loose.
What does a software engineer look like to you, then?
i completely agree with you, a software engineer looks like a person who writes software. but that doesn't change the online experience that i have had as a man, which is namely, if a girl texts you, she's not a girl, and she certainly isn't your friend.
The reason that I ask is that your account is pretty new and this seems a little bit like stowing up discord on social media.
Regardless. There is a difference between a beautiful woman that can code (these are actually getting more and more prevalent) and the trashy looking profile picture that all of us instantly know is some kind of spammer or scammer in our DMs or our inbox.
The fact that they're portrayed as woman has more to do with the loneliness of many men in tech than anything else and pretending that this type of behaviour is non-existent is childish when it's clear that places like LinkedIn and Twitter could do a lot more to detect it and prevent it.
Read my comments. I have been discussing my job in Europe and my work with vectorised optimisations.
Seems like a lot of work for sowing discord, but you make the call.
> It’s toxic as fuck. Being a woman in tech blows. You can’t be pretty or you’re considered incompetent and shallow. You can’t be ugly or you’re treated poorly for that.
One of the best programmers I've ever worked with was a woman. Former Google. I'd prefer not to discuss how attractive she is because it doesn't matter to me. I'm sorry you're having a rough time in Scandinavia and, from your comment history, formerly the USA. I've worked with non-aggressive teams from different places, but I've also observed women being mistreated in both Canada and the USA as well.
That said, I've seen ASD men mistreated as well. Unfortunately there are jerks out there and we can all try to do better.
He didnt say they were random girls like we meet every day, he said model. When men contact me on linkedin for insurance products and they look like Calvin Klein underweare models, Im like "hum" too.
This reminds me of a billboard campaign to hire developers that ran a few years ago, and featured a few SEs, including one woman considered attractive. A lot of people said things along the lines of "this isn't what a real SE looks like", along with many... less nice things. Of course, she actually was a full stack engineer at that company. This prompted her to start a campaign (#ILookLikeAnEngineer). For more details read her blog: https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/you-may-have-seen-my-fa...
Note to some commenters: I'm not saying that you can't tell a fake profile from a not fake profile. I'm saying that a sentence like "they look more like models than software engineers" is implicitly hinting that software engineers are not attractive females. That's the objection that I believe teux was raising, and it's a valid one.
With your line of reasoning, people would be defending phishing emails because "some representatives have bad grammar skills". Think of how lubricous that would be in a discussion on phishing.
I'm specifically saying that saying a phrase like "they don't look like software developers" just because they're good looking women is in itself a bad (and false!) meme to circulate, which in itself is a bad thing, regardless of context.
Just. Saying it sucks to be a woman in tech and statements and sentiments like this are part of the reason why.
Still no one answered my question: “What does a software engineer look like then?”
I think it was a combination of me being not explicit enough and touching on an obviously sore subject for others. But I don’t have the energy to unravel it or debate.
That's not a gendered stereotype, though, that's all technology people.
Of course woman in tech can be pretty. Grace Hopper is 100x more pretty than any model in the world.
She also really, really good at her job.
Her profile on LinkedIn looks like what you describe.
Even when the ruse is revealed, many victims are unwilling to let go. The truth triggers an emotional whiplash—the promise of a soulmate, a new, fulfilling life, and mutual trust is suddenly lost, leaving the intense feelings of love behind. Once found, the real man in the photos becomes a surrogate for the fantasy. “Some of them would reach out to me and [say], ‘Now that I know what the real person is like, are you still single?’” Victor said. “‘Can I meet you? Can I FaceTime you?’”
SMH.
Time to retire Cinderella and similar stories.
also
>even after he convinced them that they had been scammed, they sometimes wanted to strike up a friendship with him. “I can’t even tell you. I would spend an hour on the phone sometimes talking to these women
So: "Sure. Here's my 900 number".
Same should be done for a lot of interactions, such as hiring, employee to employee requests involving money, bank accounts or authorisation, and so on. With deep fakes and AI scamming will get more and more sophisticated and at scale.
Eagerly waiting for this “new normal” to come to Russia. You see, we have 6 forms of each pronoun. Mine’s are: “он / его / ему / его / им / нём”. Please, remember and use each one correctly. Like:
You blame его. But: you are speaking about нём. Not a single mistake, please.
But if you insist - could you please refer to me by Russian pronouns I've just listed. Is it really that much harder to learn 6 short foreign words than some "English" ones like "zee", "vi" and "vim"?
But again, why stop at short ones? If you insist that my pronouns are there for my comfort (but not for your convenience while speaking about me) - could you please refer to me as "they-masters-of-Universe-and-true-electors-of-American-presidents"? So that your listener will know that my gender is "Russian male". It will give me a huge comfort.
The English-speaking world has largely settled on singular 'they' as a catch-all for the small minority that prefers neither he or she. Practically it looks like an extra drop-down option on official forms, and when you meet someone who looks like they don't try to go with a stereotype of any particular gender you can optionally ask them what pronoun they go by.
Those made-up pronouns are a fringe thing, some internet communities will make them into a game. On the other hand, if we met and you preferred we switched to Russian, I would totally try to accommodate that!
So, the actual table of my pronouns looks like this:
И (who?) он
Р (whose?) его, него
Д (to whom?) ему, нему
В (whom to blame?) его, него
Т (by whom?) им, ним
П (about whom?) нём
There are 2 phonetical variants of some pronouns. In order to decide which one to use you should translate your sentence into Russian, check phonetical surroundings and use the proper phonetical variant of the proper grammar form of the pronoun.
So: Give it to ему. But: Go to нему.
If people will refuse to do this work of mental translation to Russian and back for my pleasure - do you think we should regulate it and enforce by law?
The article mentions Tindler Swindler, and I can vouch - it's a great film. It is an absolute puzzle at first, cause the man spares no money to trigger a Cinderella in the victims: real charter jet, real high-class hotel, real flowers and gifts. And she has 0 at her bank account - what the man that can burn more money in a day that she makes in a year may potentially want from a poor girl, financially? Then the puzzle is solved (but I will not spoil here).
The film moves slowly and shows how the girls were hooked. And you can clearly see that they have no defense. Absolutely no defense, except to kill Cinderella inside herself, and before the fact at that.
But is it possible or correct to tell a girl "You should never date higher than your own status (whatever it is)"?
I do not see any possibility to resist. Yes, "It's too good to be true". But the jet was real...
If she was "just tindlering" (I really like the English language for the ability to verbify everything), it wouldn't have, because she's not taking out loans for each guy from tinder she spends an evening or a night with.
So, in her place - when to tell yourself to stop? Certainly not at flying by a private jet to Paris. Problem is she is hooked after that. Like yes, it is nice thing to have all these quarters dumped on your lap in a casino, but that’s exactly the proper time to leave. We had nice night in Paris, bye! Still, casinos exist and prosper. Dzin-dzin-dzin! - somebody won, why not you?
Hard stop I think should come after him asking her for money. “Our casino is experiencing some financial difficulties, could we please borrow some of your savings so that the entertainment could continue?” But we should show each girl Tinder Swindler for her to be able to do this, to stand up and leave at this time. Cause she has already placed herself into a relationship, yes. But probably wouldn’t help anyway, like teaching math has not bankrupt casinos.
It's a crazy work, but you make a good point that casinos thrive while everyone preaches that the house always wins and the gambler always loses. Even with that knowledge, I suppose it would be easy enough to say "those other people got tinder-swindled, but I'd notice if that was happening to me".
Frankly, it's a necessity given the opposite is either stripping away rights (no humanitarian person is in favor of that) or somehow squashing every would-be predator (good luck doing that without a massive false positive population). We already see the latter happening today and many are unhappy about it.
The same is answered to people in similar situations the moment they become adults. Either we revisit all of that or keep the status quo.
I think the problem comes from attraction being hackable via a particular kind of hypernormal stimulus. It should be easier to distinguish a psychopath putting on a show from someone who is stably or meta-stably in a higher status bracket than it is. People caught in these kinds of webs mention all sorts of red flags they failed to pay proper attention to after the fact, so it's not like there's no difference. And yet, we're not evolved to pay attention to the warning signs. On the bright side, the evolutionary pressure to pay attention now is pretty great.
Btw, these scams are a worldwide trend. The wildest case I've read was about a Japanese lady scammed by a "Russian astronaut" seeking $ to pay his "landing fees" for returning to earth to meet her [1]. I've also read in local Greek news for >1 cases of ladies getting scammed by "US soldiers/officers", who at some point claim to be stranded in their deployment and ask for $ so they can travel to meet them in Greece.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ad7vn/japan-romance-scam-ru...
It shouldn't be surprising that the ~50% of the population that is stereotyped over centuries as having an unhealthy relationship with "being wrong in a relationship" and "not letting things go" makes good on that stereotype frequently enough to be worth an anecdote in a Vice article.
I mean, I think I get why. But still, it's the first thing I want to see when I read a story like this.
- Why aren't there any photo examples?
- OK, I get why not
- But still. Couldn't they find a way to add some photos?
Pick a few from there?
I wonder why the guys didn't want their faces in the article? That way any reverse image lookup could find the story, the victims would know without getting in touch with the guys, and the scammers would move on to other guys' faces. That would solve the problem for those guys at least!
The real issue is that the women aren't going to believe it if it doesn't link to a social media profile or similar, or if they don't talk to the person, and the scammer would easily explain the website away if they were aware of it.
Point of clarification: in most instances, it's not the victim that does the reverse image search, but some friend/family member who is trying to assist the victim after the fraud has already happened.
These guys get frequent death threats. It's reliving trauma.
> That would solve the problem for those guys at least!
That's how therapy is supposed to work. You just asked "why don't people just face their fears in therapy RIGHT NOW and get it over with?" The answer is "because people have emotions".
Sadly, emotions are also the reason these fraud schemes work.
My face will never ever be used for a romance scam.
Imagine your disappointment if you ever find out that it was, and it did better than you ever did.
Not posting pictures of yourself online seems to be a pretty reasonable, sensible preventative measure for anyone. I don’t (to my knowledge) have pictures of myself floating around social media, and I don’t consider myself to be “living my life as a monk.”
But having a gay guy have a wide following of women in love with him is hilarious
Women loved Rock Hudson. I think there are a number of gay women stars that are quite popular with men.
Social media is very weird. People can have entire friendships, romances, and work relationships, without meeting the other person. I had a friend whose wife left him for an online relationship. She got to the other state, met the guy (it was not a scam), and then things didn't work out. By then, however, it was too late.
Best thing that could have happened to him. He's been happily married to another person for many years.
Yup. IME, the best way for a spouse to leave you is for someone else.
When they have someone that they're in a hurry to settle down with, they're unlikely to argue over splitting of assets, or custody of pets, or access to children, because they want the process over as soon as possible.
When they are leaving you because they are unhappy with you, then they'll argue over every single petty and trivial thing, and drag out the process for two years.
Sure, it may hurt more when you find out that they've been cheating, but that will still be less painful when they take out their frustration with you using the kids visitation schedule.
Just don't get married, ever.
It's an interesting explanation. (That gay men pay more attention to their appearance than straight men because they want to be attractive to men rather than women, and men both gay and straight are more visually oriented than women.)
This theory would predict that gay women would pay much less attention to their own appearance than straight women do (since the women they want to attract care less about looks than men do).
Do you think that's the case?
There are exceptions, where they just go for "comfy", however.
Men over 40 do not need to pay any attention to their appearance, grooming etc. They just need to not wear a wedding ring. (Ask me how I know...)
But they would absolutely NOT tolerate their partner actually spend more time fussing about his appearance than them. Instant ick. Feminine behaviour.
What would you think if Vice had written:
"The male voice, tinged with a Black-sounding accent...."
"The male voice, tinged with an Asian-sounding accent...."
"The male voice, tinged with an Italian-sounding accent...."
Why of course you'd think "That publication is hate mongering! They're trying to subtly guide the reader to bad thoughts about their target!"
Which is exactly true.
Vice just having a little slip of the tongue and showing what's really up.
Identity will always be a difficult problem, but being able to own your own face / likeness by demonstrating it should be technically possible right?
Forced visual "captchas" something like "please take a photo standing on one foot and your finger pointed at your nose"
Then once you own your likeness with "faceID" likeness similarity isn't it then easy to monitor the images uploaded to the profile or am I completely missing something?
Not to mention the near future triviality of image generating AI being able to just recreate what you're asking it for a "capchat". I mean once it figures out hands that is.
I guarantee you that scammers will find ways to convince their victims regardless of photos being verified or not.
Here’s a related question: every day, people lose access to their Google or Facebook accounts. This could easily be solved with some process where they could get a third party (librarian, notary, police or DMV, etc.) to do an ID check. Nobody does this because the cost would be greater than zero.
They already know that (1) they want to avoid any type of verification attempts by the victim and (2) the relationship with each victim has a timer.
The attractive picture is just a lure (like in fishing). It only matters for the initial hook. All effort after the initial contact is directed towards building a story/narrative of the profile and latching onto the victim's emotions.
Deepfakes aren't needed. Until the con saturates the supply of victims, these cons don't need to evolve.
It is quite similar to cult followers like QAnon. They want to believe desperately on what is comforting discarding what is reasonable.
My Brazilian family of Bolsonaro supporters camping in front of barracks demanding a coup-d'etat is an example of it, similar to Republicans that believe in the Big Lie.
Most people love comforting and convenient lies and don't like uncomfortable truths.
This is the plot of 'Love Hard' with Jimmy O. Yang.
This article[2] was eye-opening for me in helping me understand how the brain filters information before it can reach System 2. You probably notice it when you talk to people and they reject / deflect facts that disconfirm their priors.
While I agree with you about the {QAnon, The Big Lie, Bolsonaro protesters} examples, I think people (including myself) severely overestimate _our own_ ability to withstand something untrue that tickles our confirmation bias. We all have these features, only some people have better control over their System 1 filters.
I'm fascinated by these topics because (1) I work in cybersecurity and (2) I have family members that fell into QAnon + The Big Lie. Learning about _Street Epistemology_[3] has been really interesting to help me better understand not only many of these belief systems, but how discussing them in selective ways can avoid the filters/defenses of System 1.
[1] https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/kahneman-fast-slow-thinking...
[2] https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/truth-status-and-tribes
Agree. Very good point. Thanks.
You dont get engaged with or attempt to marry someone you've never met in person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manti_Te'o#Catfishing_incident
Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist https://www.netflix.com/title/81580141