Ruskie rats selling Choose-Your-Own-Adventure love scams Russians have delivered another blow to beleaguered love rats with the sale of automated and plug-and-play online dating scam packages. The services are slung on underground crime sites and promise a response rate of 1.2 percent from love luckless men. The rort will earn net scum US$2,000 a week if they send out 30 romance …
The person running the scam pays the staff center fees. Charging the sucker at this point is more than likely to kill the ruse right there. It only makes good business sense for the call center to do it that way, the scammer isn't going to rat them out and there is no risk of the charge being reversed and losing out on the cash. If they don't try to scam the target, they can claim that they are just a phone-sex type service (relationship fantasy rather than sexual fantasy, but otherwise similar) and the scammer is just a payment processor; giving them plausible deniability and prevents the operation from being shut down in case the police come calling. Plus they'd be killing their source of business as reputation is everything in the black-market in exchange for a very short-term gain.
Turns out that Anastasia was killed with the rest of her family after all, so the cartoon was a load of bollocks and the singer who had hits with "I'm Outta Love" and "Left Outside Alone" was an imposter as evidenced by the fact she couldn't spell her own name and was obviously nowhere near a hundred years old at the time.
I'm still hoping that Oksana, the well-built tractor mechanic and former shot putt champion is real, and she assures me that the large quantities of chemicals she was given in her former career have not had too much effect.
Seriously, who gets up in the morning and heads out to the call center where their job is scamming people for $10 a pop? Do they ever look themselves in the mirror and wonder about their life choices?
On a related note, I've found that the fastest way to get the "Tech Support" scammers to curse effusively at you is to ask them whether their mother is proud of what they do for a living.
Having received a message from someone on another website (which I'm *really* not going to tell you what it was!), and then being told I'd need to pay for the privilege of getting them to the UK, I decided to see how deep the rabbit hole went...
It turns out there was genuinely a woman involved. More amusingly, she was prepared to do some interesting things to demonstrate she was genuine. Hint to others incidentally if you want to confirm there's a real person on the other side: marker pen, your username, the date today, and a body part of choice. I don't think for a minute that she (or her friends, because someone else was clearly taking the pictures) was intending to leave Nigeria if I'd transferred all that money across, but it certainly livened up a boring week.
That's been happening a lot with refugees coming out of Syria. She'll find a someone that is claiming to help her get out of the country, and for all she knows, that is what is happening. Once the target is bled dry, she is told that they backed out and she'll have to try again. If she starts catching on or making trouble, she'll be threatened with having her children given to ISIS fighters as a reward (8 year old girls are ISIS's equivalent to medals) or sold as slaves.
*I volunteer for a charity that helps to free women from the above, and similar, situations.
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