this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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When I was a kid, my parents had "the talk" with me. It was about sex. Now I'm older and my parents are too. I have to have "the talk" with them. It's about scams.
My uncle got divorced a few years back and it nearly crushed him. He we a ridiculously handsome young and successful man, so women chased him. At any point when he was younger he had at least a handful of women actively pursuing him. Now he was older and divorced. Those women were long gone, all having married and carried on with their lives. He didn’t expect to struggle with dating like he did and that made the whole thing even harder.
I set him up on all of the big dating sites. I didn’t know how bad it was, I’d never used them.
He was talking to at least 10 scammers a day, probably more.
He’s kind of a miser so no one was going to get any of his money, but his hobbies showed his wealth and oh boy did they try.
It was so bad that he gave up on the dating sites entirely. He’s had a few girlfriends since then but he only met one person in over a year on the dating sites.
It blows my mind just how many people are out there making a living scamming people.
The sad thing is that, in the current era, virtually all dating sites are scams riddled with bots and have been for over a decade. Their goal is to make money not produce matches.
He really struggled with it.
I’d do a reverse image search and find the actual person, he’d thank me and move on. Some of them got in his head. One even faked a Skype call with a video of a beautiful woman and somehow scouted his Facebook profile to really dive deep into his personality. The video was like 13 pixels and she’d say, “I’m sorry, I live way out in the wilderness and we have bad satellite internet.”
He said, “She’s too good to be true. No one is this agreeable.” I told him to ask her to make a specific gesture because of all of scammers. He did, he asked her to hold her hands above her head in the shape of a triangle. She refused, said something like, “I can’t believe you don’t trust me. That breaks my heart. You know me.” She stopped talking to him, a couple weeks later she messaged, “I’m so sorry, my mom is in the hospital and I have no money to eat. I wouldn’t ask you but I have been alone so long you’re all I know.” He told her if it was that desperate she could prove who she is and he’d help. Nope. Nothing. Radio silence. That one really hurt him. Whoever it was played the scam game real good.
You might not believe this, but I have a cousin (my mom’s first cousin actually) who fell in love with her scammer. He conned her out of thousands of dollars, turned out to be from Nigeria when he said he was from somewhere else. About 6 months in he said, “Listen. I am not who I have said I am. My real name is John, I am truly in love with you. I know you and I want you to really know me.”
She was in her 50s, he was in his 30s. She was not an attractive woman. She was short, fat, walked with a limp and was born with physical deformities (her nickname to us kids was “old bat”, playfully of course). He wasn’t attractive either, but still. 20 years younger, from another country, had, I don’t know, scammed her. My mom tried her best to stop it, but she flew to Nigeria and married the dude. She stayed over there a few months and then he flew back with her. He stayed with her about 4 years I guess, and he ran around with any woman who would have him. He finally drained her money and rolled out.
The last thing I heard about him, he was arrested for breaking into the grocery store he worked at and robbing the safe.
It is crazy to me just how much money can motivate people to do absurd and crazy things. I can’t relate at all. I’ve been broke as shit and all I had to do was sell a few things to get back on track and I couldn’t motivate myself to even do that. Money just doesn’t mean enough to me to go to any trouble to get it haha.
If you're not careful, the subject of both those "talks" will fuck you raw