As I grow older and less naïve, I realize that the truth is hard to find and that so much of what I had believed, was just a ruse, a scam, a way to assuage the awful truth that we are mortal, temporary, and like all things will forever pass away.
But we comfort ourselves with the belief that there is more than this. We fool ourselves into believing what we wish. We create an illusion that hides the truth.
Internet Scammer Rendered with Nightcafe [1]
Think of all the songs about love, how it makes the world go round. How can anyone argue with that? There’s nothing like romantic love heightened by sexual connection. It’s why there are 8 billion of us today. Think of all that sexual connection.
And it stays with us even into old age when reproduction is an afterthought.
It’s another common vehicle for scammers for whom I’ve been prey, or I should say stalked prey.
According to a recent report on CNN,[2] such romance scams victimized more than 19,000 Americans in 2022. I can only imagine how many todays as the practice has grown considerably during the last year. This scam is global in its proportions.
In Singapore, they are one of the top scams:
[It] also is increasingly happening on an industrial scale with the rise of “cyber scam centers” that have links to human trafficking in Southeast Asia, according to INTERPOL. Victims of trafficking are forced to become fraudsters by creating fake social media accounts and dating profiles to scam and extort millions of dollars from people around the world using different schemes such as fake crypto investment sites.
I’m well along in my 70s -- and often approached by young women wanting to become friends who look like models. This has happened a lot on Facebook. This has been increasing with along with the development of the Internet, and they call it “Catfishing,” when someone misrepresents themselves using romance as the means of deception.
“Age is just a number,” they all say.
Having had some experience with this, I know how ridiculous this is when you’re talking about relationships. Age difference is a real obstacle.
But I always have been polite, sometimes a bit unrealistic and subject to flattery. However, I always stopped short when they asked for money. One pleaded with me that she needed it to eat and that she would reward me later. It was laughable.
The same thing was happening to a friend I grew up with and we compared notes. Many of the same hotties were PMing both of us.
Another induced me to connect with her on WhatsApp, before I had read about scammers there. She looked like a 10+ model with eyes like sapphires and long black hair, a bit like Angelina Jolie but even better looking, and tried to persuade me to invest in crypto. That’s probably the last thing in the world that I’d want to do.
Rendered with Nightcafe
Then I learned that you can do an image search on Google. Using their Facebook pictures which were nice but not too naughty, I found most of them on escort or even x-rated sites, and very naughty. So, whenever I was contacted, I would send them their x-rated pictures and that usually put an end to it.
Sometime later, the one who had asked for money popped up again on Facebook and asked if I wanted a hookup. She said she is not expensive and was staying in my state at the time. She offered to drive to meet me. Crazy stuff and totally unrealistic.
I did an image search of her and found her pictures not only on an x-rated site, but were pictures of a Social Media Influencer (SMI). Maybe the SMI was using a different name to make some extra money. I never found out.
Rendered with Nightcafe
There was one who seemed different. She introduced herself on Substack, which I hadn’t thought was used by scammers.
She wanted to make friends and learn about Substack. I checked her headshot and nothing suspicious showed. I thought perhaps she really wanted to learn how to use Substack so she could start posting articles. So when she suggested we move to WhatsApp, I asked her to call so I could hear her voice and verify she was for real, and she did.
A continuous thread of messages followed for two days during which she told me about her divorce, her daughter and her parents with whom her daughter was living in Singapore, her homeland, and about her move to the U.S. 13 years earlier to get away from an abusive husband. She now was in a good situation and working as a CPA / financial manager—personal things that none of the other scammers revealed. She said her words came from her heart and when I told her my age, which was more than 30 years her senior, she said, of course, “Age is just a number.”
She also sent two more pictures:
Rendered with Nightcafe
I brought up the topic of UFOs and she was very interested. Because she lived, or so she said, in a city which was near some of the most famous UFO incidents in U.S. history, and still an area with many sightings, I said that I’d been wanting to take a tour of those places. “You can fly here and we can use my company’s Mercedes SUV for the trip,” she said. A Mercedes? I forgot to mention that earlier she had subtly remarked that she came from wealth, and to her annoyance, men seemed more interested in that than her.
Nevertheless, I thought I better do an image search of her pictures. To my disappointment, I found those same pictures on an Asian dating site for women over 40. She said she didn’t know how they ended up there and tried to divert the conversation to more talk about visiting her.
But to put the nail in the coffin, a friend found that she had created a Facebook profile with those same pictures and a different name.
My friend who taught English in Taiwan and has traveled throughout Asia, suggested that it was possible she was being trafficked and forced into this arrangement. When I told her about the Facebook page and use of different names, and hinted at the possibility that she might be the victim of trafficking, she wouldn’t explain. Instead she said that if I couldn’t trust her, then there was no use in communicating further.
In the next day, I noticed for the first time that she would constantly go online and offline on WhatsApp, before finally removing her visibility from me. This seemed suspicious and perhaps my friend is right, that she was one of those being trafficked and was continually monitoring her potential victims. Another consideration is that she contacted me on Substack, while all the others did so on Facebook.
Or maybe she was a freelancer and scamming men on her own. Note, she said she was from Singapore, a center for online romance scams. Who knows? Who knows who anyone is any longer.
So, if you are an old guy suddenly contacted online by young women who look like models on magazine covers – ask yourself, why would they want to contact you?
As they say, if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.
Just like “Make America Great Again” – Was it ever really great? Certainly not when it was raising the Confederate flag.
How can a nation that believed in slavery and that those of another race are meant to serve them be considered anything but evil and demonic? [3]
[1] All images of models were Nightcafe’s reimaging of actual images of those who attempted to scam me.
[2] “What is catfishing and what can you do if you are catfished?” CNN, January 30, 2024.
[3] In his so-called Cornerstone Speech, delivered on March 21, 1861, in Savannah, Georgia, the Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens described the new Confederate constitution:
“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution . . .”
Furthermore, he said:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”