Scammerama

Amazon offer a premium service called Prime.  From what I can gather, for $7.99 a month, you get free delivery, music, and movies.  Not something I want, but hey ho  However, enterprising scumbags in India want to persuade me to unsubscribe from it.  The phone rings, and it's Amazon Prime telling me that I am signed up, and if I want to unsubscribe I should press 1 An Indian girl answers, seemingly surprised to hear from me - I expect that most people simply hang up.  She introduces herself as Jennifer.  She tells me that scammers have signed me up for Amazon Prime for $39.99 a month and do I want to unsubscribe?  Yes please. She transfers me to "Simon", who speaks much better English.  He tries to talk me through the process of unsubscribing.  This involves giving him control of my laptop.  I don't think so, Simon In the bottom left hand corner of my keyboard, he tells me, is the Ctrl key.  Unfortunately I can't see it.  After a while we establish that he means t

As regular readers (both of them) will know, I like to wind up Ghanaian love scammers and get them banned from Facebook. Good news is that after a few months of inaction, Facebook is zapping fake accounts again - in fact, they have taken to warning me about fakes! They used to come back and say the account doesn't violate community standards. Now they zap them, almost on demand. It's very gratifying Take, for example, the lovely Aminizia Don Classic Busty Blonde looks - and lives in Ghana. Why is it almost always Ghana? I suspect that someone in Accra has made a killing and everyone wants to copy him Aminizia's profile checks out - although I suspect that her first name is actually Donald.  Unlike her lovely compatriot, Smith Saint.  A brunette - makes a nice change.  One gets so tired of busty blondes.  Well, no, that isn't strictly true, but it does show a little bit more imagination on the part of my scammer.  Not often you meet an Ebenezer these d

Hundreds of thousands of people fall victim to scams in the UK every year. Many are run from criminal call centres abroad, where teams of fraudsters operate around the clock. One man in the UK, who goes by the name "Jim Browning", decided to do something about it. He hacked into a call centre in India from where scammers target their victims. Jim gained access to the recorded scam phone calls as well as CCTV footage exposing the scammers at work. What Jim did was illegal - but he says he wants to stop the fraudsters, and he passed his footage on to BBC Panorama. Watch here

So why are these guys getting in touch?   I say guys in the sense of young male people.  It's almost never an actual female.                               In Ghana the average.monthly wage for an agricultural labourer is $15.  So what rich westerners like me spend on a cup of coffee would feed a family for a week.  You might feel a bit guilty about that - I urge you, if you do, to donate the price of a cup of coffee to a legitimate charity like Oxfam - there's probably a shop on your High Street. The scammers will happily take any amount of money - I've had requests from $20 up to $11,500.  The usual request is $200 though - a year's wages.  So you can see their motive.  How do they get in touch?  In my case I am pretty sure that it's because I am active on social media.  They join a discussion group and lurk.  When someone pops their head above a parapet, they send a friend request.   A big red flag is that their friends are all fat old bald men (hey, I

Okay, so if you are a teenage lad from Kumasi, Ghana, where are yo u going to get photos of some gorgeous babe with which to scam money out of some FOBM (Fat Old Bald Man) on the internet? Well, the Internet, obviously.  There's no shortage of pretty girls on the Internet.  If you are interested, you can do a search on their chosen photo using Google Image, and it will pro bably take you to some porn site.  I don't usually bother - because who cares where they get the pics from? Madly, some of them use their regular profile, and just stick a couple of pretty girl pics at the top.  Scammers, if you are reading this, just don't bother - it's a huge red flag. Others set up a brand new profile, blank except for a couple of pretty girl pics.  It's another red flag, I'm afraid, Mr Scammer. Haha!  Was chatting with a scammer and she sent me a nude photo, as they do.  But forgot to crop the Janessa Brazil dot com link from the corner!  Obviously I realised th

Well, another day, another beautiful model girl Engi Neer Feranmi Amos (Joy Russ Norwood) - I suspect that Amos meant to set up a profile in Joy's name, and screwed up, but didn't bother to start again.  Perhaps he didn't realise his mistake. Anyway, Amos is from New York, attending a modelling seminar in Turkey.  Do models attend seminars?  Perhaps they do, I don't know a lot about being a model.   She obviously has plenty of time to talk, or maybe she is just naturally loquacious: i know you will think what is a pretty lady like me doing on here. Yes the reason I came on to the Internet to find the special person who deserves all the love and passion that makes up my heart and soul is because I do not have the time to meet others out in a public setting, and the fact I feel you can learn so much about someone through letters, as a person has to take there time and think about the words they want to express,so it allows you to gain a better understanding of