Scammerama

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...

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!  Obviousl...

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...

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 ...

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