Scams, dating and my fake life

A tumblr about my dating experiences. Some scammers may apply.

[scamdating]

Trading for love

So this has been going on for a while since you see from the earlier posts, I guess. I haven’t written a new post about this perticular match yet, since there really hasn’t been much to report. We’ve been going back and forth about how stupid I am becuase I am not accepting her kindness. Mind you, she still wants me to invest around $1000 or more to “get started” in improving my life and financial situation. Sure, if I had that kind of money I probably would, but I mean it’s quite a lot of cash...

Kind of funny though; I’ve actually matched with two more people on Tinder this time, that wants me to start trading. I keep telling them I do not have a job so my income can not handle a large amount of spending right now. But they both pretty much insist on that it will help me improve my financial situation and my life. One of them actually is trading on the same MT4 server as the one that made me create this tumblr. The other one is using another company, and their app looks super sketchy. Poorly made, incorrectly scaled graphics etc. She’s been the most pushy of them all so far, though she hasn’t really been calling me stupid. Just in general keep talking about how the prices of the AMN cryptocurrency keeps going up and I am missing my chance to invest.

[scamdating]

From Russia with love, part 3

So at this point I am pretty sure this is a catfish, but I have yet to figure out what it is she wants with me buying her tickets. Does she just want to flee her country or whats going on? This is something I will never know, because I doubt she’ll admit to anything. She does tell me that the trip will be pretty much what she earns in a month - around €340. I don’t think anyone with a kid could survive on this salary even if it was true. I mean, if you had seen pictures of the person she’s trying to impersonate you’d understand. She doesn’t look very poor, does photoshoots with her kid quite often and takes care of herself.

At this point I think she’s pretty sick of me being being indecisive, since she keeps asking about the tickets and if I will pay for her living space. I do ask her at some point why she is not going to pay for anything. She replies that she thinks it is up to the man to pay, this is what she believes in. It’s a quite dated mental state - buuuut I guess it’s how it is in Russia? I have no idea to be honest.

After some back and forth, and talking about random stuff she seems quite frustrated about me not being really clear about not being able to pay for the trip and her hotel, she says her grand parents wants to pay for the trip. But they are on vacation and does not have access to any Western Union offices where they are currently located. (FINALLY some proof of this being an actual scam...) She continues to tell me that the grandparents will transfer money to my bank account, and then I will just have to process it to her via a Western Union transfer. I didn’t really ask why they just can’t directly transfer it to her, she just insists that they do not have access to Western Union. I kind of panic at this point - Do I set up a new bank account and see if any money will actually show up, or what do I do? (I did get it confirmed from my bank that no personal details will be able to be found out only from a bank account number, so I am safe) This is basically a money laundring scam at this point and I do not want to take part of it.

At this point I am not sure what to do, but I am curious if she is still using the Global Layer virtual server since I sent them an email about it. Never got a reply. So I quickly go and find some random AirBnB and make a new grabify link. I send it to her... and she replies, telling me this link is marked as unsafe. I ask her what she means, and just tells me that it says that the link is fraudilent. I ask for a screenshot and she sends me an actual photo of a computer screen in which Chrome says the link is untrusted. F R I C K ! I quickly make another one, and send her that one instead... “Are you trying to find my IP?” Welp, I am busted. (Also I doubt she’d know what an IP is considering what she does for work, and how little she gets paid...) I try to play stupid again, “What?”.

I reached out to Telegram to report her account, and it got marked as “SCAM”. So there is hopefully some profit, and maybe we’ve prevented someone else from being scammed as well. Although according to the Telegram profile she has not been online since December - but I am not sure how it looks when someone blocks you.

[scamdating]

From Russia with love, part 2

More chatting has been going on at Telegram. We share more details about each other, and our days. Of course most of the stuff I share is made up or pretty vague just so I don’t actually share any real stuff about myself - although a bit of it is based on the actual me. Suddenly, she asks if I can buy her plane tickets. They are €340 she says. “Oh, shit. Here it comes - this is where she asks for money....”. I tell her I am a bit paranoid about giving away money, since I have been scammed before (I told her about it in a previous email). She just says that she wants tickets, and not money. I can buy them myself. I tell her again I am a bit paranoid about this still... Maybe I can pay half of the ticket? Since she has to travel from the city she lives in, to Moscow, she will need money herself since the trip is a bit far. It is about 800 km. I did check and there are tickets that has layover in Moscow, so that wouldn’t really be an issue for her. But I guess some people don’t really look up all the information. Which in this case is kind of weird, since so far I have had issues figuring out if she is real or not. I start investigating some more, just random searching... I still can’t believe none of the reverse searches finds any of her pictures........... Really bummed out about this. I once again browse the hashtag for the event she had on her badge earlier. I find some more posts of her with other people I didn’t think to check out more earlier. It really doesn’t provide much. I just see that people interact with her in the comments. I check around on the peoples profiles, not many posts from the event. This is kind of weird, considering it seems to be a popular event for the professions they all are posting so much about otherwise. Anyway, I find a person that seem to be some kind of portrait photographer that has posted some photos of my match and her kid (she has yet to tell me about this kid... seems like an important thing to mention if you’re gonna start a relationship with someone, no?). The photographer links to their profile on VK (basically Russian Facebook). It makes me think... I quickly create an account, and search for my match there using the full name I found on the real Instagram. I find several profiles with the same name, it seem to be a common name. But I do find the correct one after some digging. It’s an old profile that dates back a long time so it should be legit. Lots of pictures too, easy for someone to use for cat fishing since it’s a public profile. I browse the pictures way back and I still have received pictures in both email and over Telegram that are not posted here. Which still makes me confused.. IS SHE REAL OR NOT? What I do find however is a picture she sent me the other day, that is dated back to 2017. She didn’t claim it to be taken the same day, but she did say “I am here”. So kind of suggestive of it being taken now. We’re still talking about buying tickets, it looks like she wants to be here for a month... A MONTH? I am not having someone living with me for a month, even if it is someone I know. My apartment is way too small for 2 people. Plus I have obvious trust issues - I am not going to invite someone I’ve never met before to spend a month in my home. I mean if it wasn’t apparent from this blog I don’t know what is. I start to look for some AirBnB places just for fun. Found a couple that are reasonable for a month - not that I will be paying a dime but whatever. I send her a link using grabify. It tells me she’s in Netherlands using Global Layer as ISP... They provide servers... Considering it’s using Intel Graphics and a resolution of 1366x768 I am quite sure that this is a virtual machine. Her timezone is set to Moscow though, I guess to keep track of the actual time over there. I know I’ve seen this Global Layer B.V. ISP before... Man, if this is not the legit person I am really impressed by this level of cat fishing. But I don’t know what they are after? A free trip to the country I live in with living space I can easily visit at?

[scamdating]

From Russia with love

Another match from OkQupid I’ve been chatting with is from Russia. Or at least claims to be, I have not tried to use grabify on her yet, which I probably should. Actually, we have not really been chatting in the sense - we have been sending emails. I know, right? Modern and fast paced communication!

Anyway, basically every email she is kinda flirty and sends me selfies. I reverse search these using several search engines and apps. I do not get any hits on them. Usually at least one of the pictures show up somewhere, but none do... She keeps telling me her life story, what she does for work and what her work day looks like. She’s like an open book. Which makes me kind of doubt this, but at the same time not - since the selfies don’t show up anywhere.

I downloaded an EXIF (meta data inside pictures) reading app to see if there is any information on what kind of device these where taken with - again, nothing. Usually if a picture is taken directly with a phone, and sent without any editing there should be some EXIF data stored. But these pictures where kind of low res too, so but I don’t think Gmail would scale them down. I haven’t actually checked.

One of the selfies she sends me shows a little bit of an event badge. S C O R E ! With this I manage to find a real Instagram account. I browse around a bit and see that there are pictures posted from this event, but none of them are the picture I got. Hmm.... Is she legit? I make note of the name of the account... I ask her in an email if she uses social media, since I want to talk to her more frequently (basically one email per day. She’s a really bad emailer!). She replies she do, and the account she mentions is not the same as the one I found (and also has nothing to do with her IRL name)... Hmmm.... It is also private, and only has a handful of posts, which seem quite common among fake accounts for some reason. This makes me think she’s just a catfish, so I take some screenshots of the account. And sends them to the real person. Some time go by, I think 1 or 2 days. I check back, no reply... She has blocked me on her real account! In a later email, she asks how I found her “work account”. I told her I got curious about the name of the event on the badge from one of the pictures, since I had never heard about it before. And decided to look for it, and I found a picture that she was in. This really threw me off, is she real or not??? Since she’s a bit flirty and bubbly in her emails, I try to be flirty back. And basically she says she starts having feelings for me. Thinks about me all the time. Even talks to her parents about me... Fast forward a couple of weeks, and she asks for my phone number. Which i provide. She calls me, we talk for a couple of minutes. I am really struggling to hear what she is saying through her bad Russian accent. I go back to her Instagram because I remember there was some videos in which she talked albeit in Russian. The voice doesn’t sound really same, but the audio quality was pretty bad as well. So I am not too sure, I am not an expert in voice science (or whatever it is called...). Her English voice really didn’t sound as cheerful and high pitched as her Russian one... In some of the emails she’s been daydreaming about the day we meet. Well, she wants to meet. And it looks like she wants to come visit. She also asks to add me on Telegram, which we do... we’ve been chatting a bit now, but I’ll continue that in another post.

[scamdating]

Trading Call

Well, I managed to get the girl to actually call me! Though I wanted to do a video call, but she just told me she was with her family so she could not do it. I am a bit skeptical that it was actually her manager and not just some dude at the scam company she works for. Time will tell I guess. It sounded like she would agree to do a video call at another time. Funny enough she also “trusted” me to use her “real” trading account, and after some guidance I made her a bunch of profit. Now she wants to buy me a gift for when we meet “next month”.

I don’t know if it’s some weird ass tactic or something, but she goes back and forth between disliking me for not “accepting her kindness” to hoping we will spend our life together earning money and traveling together. I think it is just to try to give me bad conscience so I will open up my wallet. More time passes, she starts asking me to fill up my account again... So I can “accept her kindness”, and get rich. I talk to the trading company contact, asking how little I can start trading with. She suggests $1000, that is way too much for me to even consider just having fun with... So I ask if there is anything else I can do. The option I get is to invite friends. I will basically get some money on my trading account for doing this, but only when the accounts have been created. And I have to give her WhatsApp number to my friends. This breaks my whole idea of just creating some random personas, since I will need several phone numbers for this. So I give up. The girl I matched with keeps nagging about topping off my account to accept her kindness. I remind her I can not afford $1000 to invest, I have bills to pay. She tells me I have the wrong idea and need to do this to make my life better... Several days later, I see her account has been loosing a massive amount of money. I get scared that I did something, or would get blamed for it. Nothing happens about it, she never even mentions it. I asked her later about this, and she said that she forgot to close the sale because she was chatting with me - fully blaming me for this. I looked when the event was, and compared it to our chat log in WhatsApp. We had not been chatting around this time. This ticks me off, and I basically tell her that I guess we’re not meant to be. Trading is all she cares about. And tell her to have a nice life. No reply. I wait some time, and tell her that she is a sweet person, and all this demand for investing is not sexy (I use this word instead of “cool” or whatever). I also tell her that she never show any interest in me or my hobbies, only trading.. all the time. Everything she does on her spare time is to “study” (as in the trading chart in the MT4 trading app). She has not replied since, and I doubt she will. But. She has not blocked me yet... Which I assumed she would. We will see if this continues.

[scamdating]

OkQupid trading

Pre words, there will be some missing gaps since I am pretty bad at telling stories, I forget stuff in general and just plain bad at retelling a story. Plus I might leave out some details since it doesn’t really matter. Ok, so some time ago I matched with a woman on OkQupid. I don’t remember her profile now, since it was a month or so ago. But anyway, after a couple of messages in the app she asked if I instead wanted to chat on WhatsApp. Being a bit paranoid I decided not to say I have it (I have it, and use it here and there), so we continued to chat a little in the app. From what I remember now she was a bit pushy for me to get WhatsApp, a bit of a warning flag for me. I decided to pick up a prepaid sim, just to be careful. I knew I had my old phone at home still, I usually always save at least the previous phone for backup. I sent her my new number, we started to chat on WhatsApp instead. She removed her match (or the profile, I haven’t figured out how OkQupid does this yet since I haven’t seen her again while swiping, and she’s not in the “archived chats” folder) not long after. Another warning flag, though not as serious - but I understand why they do it now - to prevent you from figuring out it is a scam so you can report the profile and have it removed. After a couple of days chatting back and forth, sending me random selfies here and there (which I of course reverse image searched, no hits...), she asks if I can help her with something. “Oh well, here it comes!” I think to myself. She wants me to help her friend... Basically she invites me to her friends metatrading company, for a demo account. Because it’s a “trading event” I have the opportunity to win something. After some back and forth about this I finally have a demo account. They give me $100,000 in virtual currency to use to trade bitcoin, or at least fractions of it. I didn’t put a whole lot of effort into this. If I remember correctly, about a week pass and I have earned a couple of thousand in fake money they tell me that I have won $500. BUT before I can get the money, I need to create a real account. For which they need personal details, and a picture of my photo ID. I do not agree to this, because I do not want to share my personal details. And of course there are no other ways for them to give me my price money. I have to trade 10 hands before I can transfer anything from my trading account to a bank account, they say. Sooooooooo... I provide them with some randomly made up details, and I take a picture of a broken ass ID card I find using google images. I use Photoshop to change name, date of birth, picture and signature and send it off to the contact at the trading company. It’s all approved and I am provided with my account... While all of this is happening I am chatting with my match. She’s quite flirty and stuff. She says she wants to meet me but she’s taking care of a family member  and is very busy... The only thing she has said to me, that she is busy with is studying the trading graph in the app (MetaTrader 4, used for Forex trading it seems). She also sends me random (very low resolution screenshots, probably stolen from google. It’s hard to reverse search these since they are basically plain text...) screenshots of her winnings. Showing positive gain the further in the “relationship” we go.

There is a lot of back and forth about love, and that I need to accept her kindness for her to stay happy with me. Her kindness is basically just tips about when to buy and when to sell in the app, to make profit. I play along with her flirty attitude and tell her I want to spoil her with lingerie and other fine things. Which only seem to fuel her more into making me trade, and add more money in to the account. Well, one day I wake up and all my money in the account (the trading account, not my actual one) is gone, and I freak out. I write to her and the contact person and we all have a bit of a panic. I thought initially that they had emptied it, and was going to try to scam me into refilling it (more on this later). Well, it turns out it was my fault. I forgot to close a sale, or whatever, in the app. I am going to be honest, the app is not very user friendly and there is nothing to guide you in on how to use it. I have asked her to show me how to use it but all she says it when to buy or when to sell as per the trend. So not very useful help. I have always been a bit skeptical if she’s even in Sweden as she claims. I have asked her where she’s staying and she just tells me it is at some relatives home. I asked where it is, and she gave me a random place in the city I live in. I think she translated it from Chinese (I believe that is where she is from at least, though her WhatsApp number is from Philippines, also a warning flag...) since it was very misspelled and I had to do some weird googling to figure out what she meant. Anyway, I have been watching videos and streams about scams on YouTube and Twitch for a while now so I have found some tools that are useful. A guy on YouTube called Pleasant Green uses a tool to figure out the location of the person. It basically creates a redirect link that snags some details about the computer before directing it to the actual website you are trying to send the person to. In this case I was linking some lingerie that I was asking about if she would like. And I found out she was in Singapore, using an older laptop with AMD R5 graphics, 1366x768 pixel resolution and Windows 7, and an outdated version of Chrome. Connected via Alibaba as ISP, didn’t even know they also are an ISP...? Not a very fancy machine for someone that claims to have been profitable in trading! So this is pretty much where I am at right now. I have no money left in my trading account and my match keeps telling me I have to refill my account to prove my love to her. I just today told her that money and love have no connection with each other, and that I do not care about how much money I have. There has to be another way to prove my love... Of course she agrees, probably to just prolong the cam even more. Oh yeah, and she told me she went home this weekend, since I hurt her because I didn’t want to “accept her kindness”, to prove my love for her... So I once again used said tool, and now she’s in China. Using the same computer, or at least one with same specs. Though this time there are more than one entry, that seems to be via a VPN (since it is listed as a web hosting company) via Japan as well. So I am wondering if the fake site is blocked on VPN, and she turned it off to access it? Regardless if she’s trying to scam me or not, I am quite impressed with her persistence. It’s been like a month or more now, and she has not blocked me yet. The other ones, that have been obvious scammers, have been quite quick about it. Usually using pictures that show up in reverse image searches or just blatant celebrities.