My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster
bentasker.co.uk
bentasker.co.uk
It's kinda sad that we're associated mostly with Prigozhin in the West (the first thing the OP remembered), although we have other interesting stuff, for example we have probably the last remaining, still practiced pagan religion in Europe: https://hwpi.harvard.edu/pluralismarchive/news/europes-last-...
Unfortunately, Pringles had such a hilarious (in a dark way) last few years that it makes it very hard to compete with.
It seems to be a similar idea, but with the scamming hidden in less-obviously-illegal places.
"pig butchering" scams can run for months of contact with no requests for money, and then instead of asking for money, the user "invests" into what appear initialy to be profitable investments alongside the scammer.
https://theconversation.com/pig-butchering-fraud-the-link-be...
That already feels morally un-great, and messing with them further no longer felt like something I could justify.
In life, there are very few situations where being unkind is ever worth it.
And even here on HN, I sometimes get the impulse to argue with someone for whatever they said. What I do is I type out my little comment, then close the tab without actually posting it. Some things are better left unsaid, regardless of how satisfying they'd be to say.
I used to believe this. But I have since changed my mind. Corporations train their reps to actively stonewall and frustrate you and hope you go away while they screw up your finances, travel, healthcare and deny you things you paid for.
A couple years ago, I was on the return flight from France to the US with wife and kid in tow. At the airport, I learned that the flight was a code-share. The airline I had booked with was meaningless. Meaning, the seats that I had paid extra for so we could sit together was no longer the seats that I picked. Even though I spent extra money to get what I asked for, I wasn't getting it because the real airline said <random paragraphs of verbiage>. Meaning myself, wife, and kid would no longer be sitting together on an 8 hour flight despite me paying extra for it, five months in advance.
So I performed what I called my "angry frustrated customer routine". I became loud and agitated several times at the airport. Until I got my way and got what I had paid for.
And how much choice do those reps have? Their choice is "follow the playbook" or "go out and find a new job".
It sounds like you yelled at someone who was not responsible for your original issue. You weren't performing. You were being.
I termed it performing as I was deliberately trying to draw attention to myself from the other passengers.
Except the customer service people willingly accept a job to act as an in-between so that any appropriate anger at a company is directed at an employee. To what extent do companies purposefully make use of this to prevent outrage directed at them? Back to the original topic, how much do the people leading these scams like pushing the story of the scammers being forced into it, because it increases the empathy that people feel towards the scammers and better allows the scams to continue?
At what point does being kind shift into a sort of pacifist mindset, that while great if everyone used it, creates fertile ground for far worse approaches to human relationships to flourish and spread, leading to the quality of the average approach to human relationships declining?
My feelings of pity towards the people being literally enslaved don't mean I don't want the scams to stop, or for the people to be liberated.
It just means I don't scream profanities at someone who had their passport stolen.
Spoilers for season 3 ahead
Used to be, for hundreds of years, you'd go visit your mom for her birthday. You'd be walking down the lane and see some wildflowers, so you pick them and bring them to her. +10 points.
In modern society, to do the same you'd drive to the florist and buy some flowers, then drive to your mom's. +10 points. But the PE firm that bought the florist laid of 100s of workers, and -10 points for supporting them. And the flowers were picked by underpaid exploited immigrants, -10 points. And you dumped a bunch of CO2 in the air from your drive and gave a newborn asthma, -10 points.
The show was saying that because of the choices that modern society and late-stage capitalism force upon us, nobody has gone to heaven for decades.
We have to harden our hearts in order to walk by the unhoused, harden our hearts to buy stuff me know is produced by slavery, pretend we don’t see the extortionist, your-money-or-your-life nature of industrialized health services, harden our hearts to the slaughter of billions of animals for the meat industry, pretend we don’t witness the ongoing ecocide and destruction of our only biosphere.
That’s before the daily servings of doom via our doom-monetizing, amygdala-destroying media outlets.
Such levels of ongoing denial and desentization impact us to the point that we live in an increasingly unhealthy state of mass psychosis. We are all freaking out internally, pretending that all is OK externally.
Wait a minute... THIS is The Bad Place!!!
Seriously though, I was super-embarrassed a year or two ago, when I received a phone call and quickly became convinced that some scammer had a hold of me.
I began questioning the poor lady on the phone and she gamely answered all my questions: location, company, including spelling her name and pronouncing it entirely differently. Many answers were quite vague and not satisfying to me at the time. But cold callers will absolutely hang up on that type of treatment!
My ultimate question was asking if she was safe or being trafficked or captive or something, because I noticed there was a dog barking in the background. And she must've been WFH.
Only after I wrote up a detailed play by play of the call and frantically reported it to several of my colleagues,
It turned out to be a totally legitimate call and somebody had authorized the marketing campaign. She just had so little information, she was unable to answer me adequately. I was so embarrassed I can't even tell you.
I don't owe anybody who calls me out of the blue my time, especially when their shit isn't together. My mom answers the phone and actually talks to these people, and politely says "no thank you", whereas I don't even pick up the phone for certain area codes, and certainly don't engage in conversation if it's clear it's some bullshit I do not care about.
Calculating points process - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY-Rzou38k4
Michael trying to explain the problem (see math on screen) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8m_5HDZF7w&t=1m40s
So, Calvinism basically.
Having said that, I have no moral problem with keeping them on the line and dragging out a conversation without being rude - every minute they're speaking with me is a minute they're not trying to convince my elderly grandmother to switch her power bill to some fly-by-night shitfarm.
Are you talking about people who have been convicted of a crime and are calling you at dinner to sell you something or conduct a survey, or about people in Southeast Asia who have been kidnapped and are being forced to run scams? I've heard of this happening in Southeast Asia, but not with actual convicts, only kidnapping victims.
If you were being mean to a random jerk, and then he pointed out "By the way, I roughed up my wife last night" would you feel more bad about being mean? But you'd feel worse if it turned out he was doing time for that same crime?
Note: I know that there could be people truly wrongfully convicted included in the set of all prisoners, but I certainly don't think that's common enough that they should be treated better than the average person.
Second note: I also am not saying being a felon means one should be punished forever or anything. Just that, yeah, prison isn't meant to be fun, and being expected to work while doing time is not cruel punishment. It's what most people do outside of prison. Anyone who doesn't accept those terms, I fully support them clicking "Decline" by not commiting crimes.
The problem I have with this is that last time I checked, nearly all sentences for people going to prison are incarceration, not incarceration+forced labour. It's the same as people cheering up prison rape because "they deserve it" or "if they don't like it, they should just stop committing crimes". Again, no one is ever sentenced to prison+prison rape, and failing to protect prisoners from each other is a massive failure of the state.
And of course we have to acknowledge that having prison population working for close to nothing creates really perverse incentives, both on the side of the state as well as enterprises employing prisoners. In fact I'd argue that even if you feel that it's entirely fair and deserved you should still be against it to stop incentivising all the nasty shit happening around it. Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working, or if they are it should be on public works not on anything that the state charges money for.
Respectfully, no it's not. Our society does in theory, and should, recognize a universal right to not be raped. It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of, with the possible exception of the Royal Family. Though I understand most of their income comes from their historical ownership of vast lands, which is slightly different.
> Prisoners should be sitting in prison, they shouldn't be working,
Why should they only be sitting? Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies? If we aren't offering a UBI to random non-criminal lazy people, I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.
Alright, maybe the comparison took it too far but I hope you see my point - the sentence is imprisonment, not imprisonment+X.
>>It doesn't recognize, for anyone, a right to not have to work and still be taken care of
Nonsense - how about the ill and the disabled? Why do we take care of them even if they don't work? Unless when you say "our society" you mean some society that doesn't have that - but then I can't possibly know where you live.
>>Where's the free room and board for those who haven't committed felonies?
Uhm....almost every developed country offers some kind of socialized housing and food stamps if you need them?
>>I don't think it's justified to recognize that as a right of prisoners specifically.
It's not their right - it's ours. We lock them up and they should stay locked up. They should sit in prison all day not because it's their privilege to be sitting around all day bored, but because it's our privilege to walk streets free of criminals - we want them there.
Also observe how even I acknowledged that prisoners could be used for work - any kind of public work where they aren't a danger to society is fine with me. But the moment you introduce a profit motive you are creating breeding ground for corruption and incentives which have absolutely nothing to do with justice.
No, but it sure smells like slavery.
Once they can’t find any true victims in a reasonable amount of time, the industry will disappear (or automate and remove the torture and amplify the attempts 1000x)
You're wasting more of your time than theirs. Think of it, you've already got your own answer. This is a whole industry and that implies people that work full time. How much time do you spend on this? Have you spent your whole day optimizing your workflow and answers to get an optimal response? Because they most certainly have.
Think about a drive through that serves three rushes in a day, people driving to work, people on theyr lunch break, and people driving home.
If each rush is an hour long how many people would need to DDOS the drive through with frivolous complaints and time wasting bullshit like 'oh let me find my change, just a second... Oops I dropped it sorry, let me get that... Oh I can't open my door can you be a dear and send someone outside to get it?' to completely disrupt the entire rush and therefoe the vital flow of cash?
If I spend twenty minutes on the phone with a scammer while I'm doing house chores like washing dishes and folding laundry that's 20 minutes that the scammer isn't making money.
If he has a 12 hour shift that's only 36 people to completely eliminate his chance of making any revenue.
How many people need to do this to eliminate the profit from this employee?
Even a famous Chinese actor was tricked and trafficked. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/china/china-actor-thailand-sc...
Just like how all the scam call centers across eastern Europe and Russia are run by Russian gangsters with ties to the Kremlin.
North Korea is also a big player in the global scam industry with many thousands of scammers operating out of state run call centers in Pyong Yang.
One thing that doesn't get discussed enough in the rise of internet scams over the past few decades is how much of the global scamming "Industry" is directly or indirectly state-sponsored.
I guess they look for people like that.
The scammer convinces the mark to put money into fake investments and escalates until the mark runs of of money or gets spooked, then disappears. It's often made more persuasive by engaging in a fake romance.
And I also want to thank the author for the wiki regarding the identification of the MUA by the Message-ID, that was a nice new detail I didn't know :)
They probably just don't care though because not doing so doesn't really risk anything.
I ended up turning the exchange into an interactive website: https://0ms.co/sexydating
Edit: Seems like this particular combination is not unique after all. Found quite a few people of the same name. Perhaps they chose a victim which can't be found trivially.
It says they're taken from the Instagram account of "a Russian personal trainer".
I doubt the author is making an ethnic distinction between European Russians and Turkic Kazakhs, so the woman is probably identifiably located inside Russia.
Really? What kind of structure do their names have? I think even cultures that used full-sentence names tended to have some conventional ones.
And certain name ideas are very common cross-culturally, as witness Bogdan / Nathaniel / Theodore (and older Diodorus / Apollodorus / Herodotus / etc) / Dieudonné / Atallah...
Going to something I know better, Chinese names can be unique, and I know someone who tells me her father specifically attempted to ensure that nobody shared her name, but I wouldn't go as far as saying that being unique is the typical case. Some names (小丽, 国强) have an attractive meaning and are used with identical spelling by large numbers of people; other names (Xīnyuè, Sījiā) show a lot of spelling variation while always being pronounced identically.
Typically names consist of 1-5 elements which can be combined arbitrarily. There are literally thousands of such elements though.
Last name often is a first name of an ancestor a few generations deep and it is likely to be unique too.
So as a result first+last name combinations are quite unique.
Urbanization is changing all this of course but some traditions are still strong. In my entire life I've met just 3 people with the same first name as mine.
Out of curiosity, are those elements meaningful or just pure sounds?
Also, for fingerprinting you can obtain a GPU model via WebGL (helps in detecting a VM), and probably can scan for known browser extensions by trying to fetch extension-specific URLs. Some sites also scan ports on the localhost by trying to connect to them to find out which software is run.
The IP address is the smtp server of course, not the individual user.
The user's IP address is not attached if you use webmail.
This is not necessarily a Gmail thing, but just how SMTP works. It's not as bad as you'd think though.
SMTP services log the IP address and/or hostname of the remote host, and the address used by the host to identity itself (known as the HELO address). This is the address of the remote SMTP service (known as the MTA), which isn't typically the IP address of the users computer where the email client runs on (known as the MUA).
Under normal circumstances your email client (MUA) connects to your email service provider (MTA), which then sends the email to the MTA of the recipient. So the IP of your MTA (email hosting service), not your MUA (your computer) is exposed.
For example: if you send an email to a Gmail inbox using MS365, the receiver (the Gmail user) would see only the IP-address from Microsoft's outbound SMTP services.
So unless you run your own SMTP service at home, or attempt to directly connect with the receiving MTA using SMTP, your IP address won't be exposed.
> Under normal circumstances your email client (MUA) connects to your email service provider (MTA), which then sends the email to the MTA of the recipient. So the IP of your MTA (email hosting service), not your MUA (your computer) is exposed.
This is incorrect, most email providers' MTA includes the MUA's IP address in the headers.
Romance scammers and “pig butchering” scams are usually run by Asian gangs. Nasty folks.
The “good” news, however, is that AI is likely to make a big impact, here, and reduce the need to kidnap poor folks.
I suppose one can then declare the mission accomplished: zero scammers left on the planet.
Also known as "advertising".
Reminds me of a small part of Neal Stephenson's "Anathem".
Or maybe a bit of Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy.
In 2008 I had a disastrous international romance that began on an MMORPG.
It was then that I learned that mail order bride companies often mediated between prospective girlfriends and the men overseas, and they actually protected both sides from scams or utter heartbreak. They made secure matches if they were reputable and they were able to arrange romances, or visas, immigration or whatever was being looked for.
Their clients alone would never have the resources to research and verify and vet one another.
It may have been a backpage, craigslist, back alley sort of operation, but perhaps sometimes it actually worked?
Hail Melania
Either would be crossing lines that I didn't want to cross, meaning that I'd stumbled upon an unexpected 4th rule of engagement: don't talk dirty with scammers."
Rules of life to live by.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWzz3NeDz3E [2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-02/human-trafficking-vie...
Yesterday someone tried to hack my WhatsApp. He call me and said something like:
> Hello! I'm from phone company $Name. Someone tried to register your WhatsApp number form $Another_city. We are calling to confirm because otherwise we will have to block your phone line with $Name.
The first problem was that $Name was not my phone company. I though it was a "change company" call that is worse than a scam because it's real and is done by the phone companies. They even let children accept the company change. So I said that I didn't authorize any change to anything. He replied that:
> You are in WhatsApp group $Something and if you don't confirm we will have to block your phone line with $Name.
Weird pause because I was in group $Something! And he continued:
> We will send you now an SMS with a code to confirm your identity, because if we don't get the confirmation we will have to block your phone line with $Name.
I hang up.
I got a SMS from WhatsApp with a secret number to install WhatsApp in a new device, that explicitly says that I should not share the number with anyone.
They probably hacked the account of other member of group $Something. The main plan is to send money request to other persons in the group. Our bank system is quite modern and everyone has in their phone an app from the bank to transfer money instantly for free. (I have not seen a dead-tree check in decades.)
So today I have zero sympathy for scammers. Moreover, I think the employees of the call centers of the real companies here have worse working conditions than the scammer here. And neither of them are in almost slavery conditions.
(From time to time we have police investigations of slavery conditions but mostly for forced prostitution and ilegal cloth factories. It's a real problem but not in the scammer area.)
In that operation those freed actually ended up in a kind of captive holding situation https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/southeast-asia/myanmar-sc...
The article mentions that the call centres in Myanmar were targeting Chinese and Americans, so although the call centers are very far away the people they are scamming might be a lot closer. Its a very international problem.)
I haven’t kept up on WhatsApp research but at some point this was true - same goes for online status and avatars. I have those set to “nobody” and “default.”
WhatsApp makes it way too easy to go from “phone number” to “real person online at X, Y, Z hours.”
On the "serving as a guide" part, some people are activists and subscribe to the idea that if they are wasting a scammer's time, this means the scammer has one victim fewer.
On the raising awareness side, there are absolutely plenty of YouTube videos, but it's always good to educate people before they become targets. The psychological and financial impact of getting scammed can be devastating. Raised awareness could also prompt the authorities to crack down on scam centers.
On the entertainment side - some people just get a kick out of it.
Additionally, this particular article breaks down the various tactics used and teaches the reader to identify them.
Also, some anti-scammer YouTubers are legitimately very skilled and entertaining to watch. Kitboga is the first that comes to mind. He has all these voices, characters, sound effects - and takes scammers on quite some adventures. Pretty funny.
In the worst cases, legitimate companies sublet their office space to scammers - the day shift are regular callcenter employees that do fully legitimate consulting/support/outsourcing stuff, and in the night the scammer crews roll in. Utterly absurd to watch, and police usually doesn't do shit because they're paid off.
I also don’t spend much time on YouTube so a blog post is good for people who don’t want to take the time warning a video.
I view articles like this to be similar to those that explain and analyze the behavior of foot solders in street gangs. Who do they approach, how, what strategy do they employ to build trust, and how do they avoid detection.
scams are not acceptable, no matter who's performing it
> I've never quite understood this sort of anti-scammer content and what its appeal is to readers.
mocking is a very effective way to raise awareness of the issue, it delivers information on how scammers act and how to understand you're being scammed, and make that information stick.
making that kind of scam inefficient is a very good way (entertaining, non-violent, essentially harmless to scammer) to make the phenomenon disappear.
If you're not already jaded with the topic, it's really interesting! There's a lot of detail and nuance to it, and yeah, there's some satisfaction in seeing the bad guys get foiled for once.
This particular investigation doesn't actually mock or denigrate the scammers. The author sets a strict rule at the very start:
Techniques not people: the aim of this is not to identify the individuals behind the scams, it's to see how they work.
That doesn't actually rule out mockery, but they don't engage in it anyway (beyond a "cheeky bastards" aside, which in any case is more about acknowledging their chutzpah).
"I am true woman! Scammers are bad!"
However, I can say from first hand experience that home cooked Russian breakfasts in Vladivostok were mind bending. As an American, when I eat breakfast but it's a small and simple affair. A cup of oatmeal and some coffee, maybe eggs if I feel ambitious.
The Russians I stayed with made hela breakfast every morning. Like a huge potluck dinner made from recognizable ingredients in very unexpected combinations. While I'm sure they were spoiling me a little because I was a guest, it was always the biggest meal of the day. One memorable example was buttered noodles and meatballs, bread, butter, cheese, cucumber slices, coffee and tea with condensed sweetened milk, and even a little dark chocolate for desert. I'm probably forgetting more stuff.
Also the kids (10 and 8) drank coffee! I think they were mostly in it for the sweetened condensed milk though.
That was an awesome breakfast for sure.
Around here, cornbread and sausage gravy, coffee (milk or tea for my teenager) is a not-uncommon Saturday breakfast. I think I made a variety of muffins last weekend. Or home-made corned beef hash with scrambled eggs, etc. You get the idea.
OTOH, during the week it's probably something simple like a sausage patty on a toasted English muffin, maybe with a scrambled egg (my version of a McMuffin). Or cereal if I'm not feeling it.
I have had Caesar and other salads for breakfast. Salads are really delicious when you don't want a heavy meal and they're quick and easy to make.
I find it hard not to put some blame on the victim though. At the end of the day you are are responsible for watching out for yourself. When I look at the pictures of these people scammed. They are most often unattractive and unaccomplished people that believe suddenly a good looking international fashion model or a Harvard Doctor is inexplicably interested in them.
I know its kinda sad but you have to have SOME idea of where you fall in the game of life and if something that much of an outlier comes along. You have got to be a little suspicious that they would really be interested in a romantic relationship with you.
You cannot protect someone that has allowed this level of delusion to be their real world view is my point. "Protecting" these people from themselves essentially requires complete submission and removal of free will from at least some part of the population by force.
I've watched the documentaries and most of the people after the fact admit that they basically did it to themselves. Nothing anyone could have done would have changed the outcome because they wanted it that way until it was too late.
Sure, some of their victims would always for it, though I suspect they're a small minority. But everyone can be scammed.
I've been a bit interested in this and have seem many interviews with the scammed people. Almost all of them admit after the fact looking back they made the choice to go along with it and at least were partially to blame from their own perspective.
I find the entire social dynamic interesting.
Give me money I will maybe give you something. Ok here is the money. <repeat forever>
How have we gotten to a point where this very obvious psychological dynamic is such a huge problem? What can be done to mitigate it?