Scammerama

I get a friend request from a friend on Facebook.  Hi, she says, have you heard the good news?  It seems that she has been awarded $100,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Sometimes from some unspecified Federal agency that is giving out large sums of money to random people for no obvious reason (because hey, that's how the federal government works, isn't it).  And guess what?  I'm on the recipient list too! All I have to do to get my money  is send an email to some guy to register my claim.  She gives me the email address of some guy.  The deal is, I've won $$$$  and I send $ to register my claim It's a bit odd, because I'm already friends with my friend - how come she is sending me a friend request?  And when I look at her profile, it's all new.   So I check - and lo and behold, my friend is wholly unaware of having sent me a friend request today.  We report it to Facebook, and after a few hours the offending profile vanishes.  But o

A delicious twist today.  I mentioned to Scammer B that someone else had been in touch recently, wanting to contact me on Hangouts. Scammer B is using a sexy photo, almost certainly of a model or porn star - I've seen her pic many times from scammers But Scammer B wanted to warn me about Scammer A - it's a fake profile! It's really a man! She has seen this photo before. No shit, Sherlock!

Out of the blue, this lovely girl wants to show me her breasts Well, you know instantly that it isn't true.  Sadly, beautiful girls don't contact me out of the blue and offer to show me their bodies.  It isn't going to happen.  You might be tempted to go along with it - you're a bloke, your brain is in your penis - and a friend of mine did.  What happens is that the scammer gets her kit off and gets you to do the same.  She then films you responding to her sex cam stuff.  And then you start to get the blackmail demands.  My friend was lucky - he's divorced and self-employed, so not easy to blackmail.  He reported to the cops, but as his scammer was in Ghana (or like mine, India) there isn't a lot that the Merseyside cops can do. I reported my one to Facebook as a fake account - gratifyingly, Facebook removed her within five minutes.  But she'll be back.  Don't get caught

Almost all the beautiful girls who want to share my life online try to persuade me to stop using Messenger and change to WhatsApp or Google Hangouts. Obviously they are up to no good, s o, naturally, I don't want to do this.   I do have WhatsApp, and even use it.   And I have had Google Hangouts ever since Mr and Mrs Google first invented it, though I haven't used it for years and years.   But of course I'm not going to say that to the scammers.   So first way to mess with their heads is to feign ignorance.  Well, I've worked in Tech Support, I can do ignorance.   "What is WhatsApp?" "Oh, for chatting on line?  I use a thing called Messenger" "How much does it cost?  Really?  Excellent" "Oh, I don't know how to do that stuff" Eventually she persuades me to try to download it from the App Store "Access Denied" "Am I doing something wrong?" Eventually I sug

One good idea is to decline their friend request.  They go away and stop bothering you.  Problem solved.  But of course that leaves them free to scam other people, not all of whom will spot them for scammers.  So I like to zap them, hurt their business, waste their time and make them feel like dirt.  Hey, not all heroes wear capes. You want to know how? Okay, go to their profile, and tell Facebook that they are fake accounts.  Mr and Mrs Facebook have got much better at deleting fake accounts in the last month or two, probably because they have had adverse publicity.  Click on the More menu - the circle with three dots Select Give feedback or report this profile Press the button marked Fake Account, and SEND Click Submit to Facebook for review Tick the box marked "I believe this goes against Facebook's Community standards" (I'm pretty sure that trying to scam me out of a $200 iTunes card is against community standards) Give it a few