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.