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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

My mind is blown.

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.

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Loneliness is a bad relationship advisor it seems. It's like going to the supermarket with an empty stomach: you end up loading your cart with a lot of crap.

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...

In addition to technical scams, lots of these relationship types come out of Nigeria and India call centers. During the day the centers sell something legitimate, like web dev or management svcs, but at night, they lock the doors and the scam crew uses the office to fleece victims.

>“‘Can I meet you? Can I FaceTime you?’”

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".

In a similar vein to how it is now normal to give personal pronouns, even if you are he/she, we should normalise opsec when online dating, even if you feel it is not needed: if everyone mentions “can I check you are not a scammer and goes through a verification call”, and it is normal it wont be seen as rude or breaking the romance”.

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.

> it is now normal to give personal pronouns, even if you are he/she

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.

In English, do you prefer he or she? And do you prefer that one to 'they'?

Why on Earth would I care? I can be referenced as "he" or "she" only if you are talking about me to somebody else, right? It's not my business to even listen to such talk.

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.

My preferred pronouns are 'latefordinner' and 'delayedfordinner'. It's a reference to a very old English joke going 'you can call me almost anything you want - but don't call me late for dinner'. My way of saying the inquirer can even call me late for dinner if they want. I realize this is serious business to some people, but I also want to signal that it is very much not serious business to me.

Well, sometimes your identity is referenced in a group setting while you're part of the group, say when a manager praises your work in a standup: "MikePlacid did a really good job with this feature, you should all be like _". I'm guessing people know which pronoun to use in those situations when talking about you, probably because you regularly broadcast your identity as a Russian male.

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!

I am not sure why I have simplified your task in my previous post. It seems you’ve agreed that pronouns exist to make me comfortable when you are speaking about me. Actually they exist to provide you some linguistic comfort when speaking about me. But if you are willing to do some extra work to provide me some imaginary comfort that I do not actually need - who am to stop you?

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?

> Time to retire Cinderella and similar stories.

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)"?

You can always tell them, however most are told from youth that they should always marry upwards. Your experience may vary.

The victim in Tindler Swindler was not trying to marry, upwards or otherwise. She was just... tindlering. And got this charming man with "Let's fly for a weekend in Paris on my private jet".

I do not see any possibility to resist. Yes, "It's too good to be true". But the jet was real...

The bridges being sold are real, too. The scam only works if they build some kind of relationship, whether it ends in marriage or just in a committed relationship (moving in together etc) is irrelevant.

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.

Yes, but the desire to form a relationship (and maybe even to form it “upwards”) - it’s a hard wired feature of a brain I believe. Woman’s brain especially. And I wouldn’t say that this wiring is unhealthy. But that guy just triggered it, “professionally”.

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.

I completely agree, and I'm sure it's hard to call it when emotions are running high. Reading about it, it often sounds insane what people fall for (someone in the thread mentioned a Japanese story where a woman allegedly believed she was talking to a Russian astronaut who was on the ISS at the time and needed the money to pay the landing fees!)

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".

Yes and yes. We've done it in the past for millennia now, and we recognize some will not heed advice regardless. It's a battle between recognizing women are individual agents who can make mistakes and bear responsibility doing so, or seeing them more akin to children.

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 don't think it's correct. There would be much less incentive for men to seek status if it didn't widen his dating pool, and a huge amount of our society's value comes from men seeking to gain status legitimately.

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.

I have behaved very strangely myself when heartbroken.

This is probably the most real comment I've read today.

>My mind is blown.

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 rewatched the movie 'Jabberwocky' recently, which has as one of the comedic story elements one or more characters that are stuck in their own particular romantic view of the world.

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