Scammology 102

He starts with

A warm hello does not come from the lips only but also from the heart. I'm Dan by name, An Army personnel here and currently on my last tour here in Yemen and I'm looking for my soul mate,the man who I can spend the rest of my life with, love and cherish him always. I want a man who is honest and trustworthy.

Reply me if you're interested in meeting me via my email address... dan.rockwell188@gmail.com and you can add me on google hangout with the same email,,
Hope to hear from you soon
Hugs
Dan

Sigh, is it everybody, or just me? A few of my profiles and apps seem to have become "scammer magnets." Those jokers really need to step up their game though, they're so easy to see through!

US military? Fine, send me something from your .mil email address?

Hey, umm, "Dan," or Ivan or M'tinga or whatever your real name is, ya'd better believe I am gonna google the name you use, there are a few lookup sites for scammers' names, and like I said, they don't have too much imagination, it's amazing how they keep recycling a few names over and over.

Talk to me about finding a "soul mate" in a first note, or other hifalutin stuff like "everlasting relationship," and I would bet the farm you're a fake, right then and there.

They always make grammar mistakes, or say at least one thing in a way that no native speaker ever would ( [I am] "an Army personnel," or "reply me" ??) And for some reason, these most untrustworthy guys 'most always include that word, "trustworthy."

And they gravitate toward WASP sounding names... do they think they sound more American than ethnic names?

So I googled the name. Turns out there is a real guy by that name, but the real one is a fitness trainer in Oklahoma.

Before reporting him to that site's owner, I replied

The warm hello can also come from the liver, the left great toe, or the bladder, though it sounds best riding on a cloud of flatus! And Yemen is a great place to work on your sun tan! I also want a man who is honest and trustworthy and did not steal his on line identity from an Oklahoma fitness trainer.

(Yeah, should have left off that last clause, I know...)

Hey, if you've got nothing better to do today, send this guy a note, I left intact the email address he gave me, and invite him to contact you if he's seeking a trustworthy soul mate!


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  • Dan,

    It seems that young military men are considered easy targets more than the rest of us… and we all get plenty of them contacting us too. The ‘them’ can be a group of guys together in an apartment in Kenya or some other African Country. They have been playing the “give me your EMail because I don’t like to write here” game for quite some time. One of them usually knows the English Language a bit better than the rest and helps the others out but you can tell it is not his or her native tongue. (I think I remember that Mark posted a picture of one of these groups a while back.) This is all in the tradition of the ‘Ambassador’ from somewhere who can get you a million dollars but needs some money to get it released. Then there are the Russian kids (usually as a solo) who are closeted in a small city and he is the only gay guy there, and on, and, on. Then there are those who even use the US Military saying that they are all alone and feel disconnected.

    The real problem is that there are guys, like you, who are genuine. I chat with a number of them from Guam, to Florida, to the Middle-East who just want an other American gay male to connect with and discuss gay male things. They don’t want anything else other than perhaps to pepper the chat with a bit of innuendo which is also being a gay male.

    So the answer is: don’t be stupid. If you feel that something doesn’t seem quite right- then trust your gut instincts. Don’t let your lust for love weaken your judgement. No one is saying it is going to be easy, however time… much time usually should clarify a great deal. The moment anyone asks for money in any way shape of form IT IS A SCAMMER.

    Best of luck... and a big thank you for doing what you do for the rest of us.
    MachineToole 12/17/2017 07:25 PM
  • Every now and again, I will get a call on my cell phone that's obviously from a scammer. In that medium, if I have the time and am in the right mood, I like to play with them, ask annoying questions that they can't very well get out of without betraying that they are phonies, and generally waste their time... hey, every minute they are engaged with me that way is a minute they can't be on the phone scamming someone else, right? And dammit, it IS fun... but on line, I can't think of any way to do that, so I just report 'em.

    Some of you reading this are no doubt shaking your head that I would waste my time that way. But it's been my experience that scammers and flim-flammers and unreasonable people in general have this expectation that we reasonable people will always behave in reasonable, and quite predictable, ways. That's even a small part of how we ended up with Donald Drumpf for president, our predictability as reasonable people en masse, I think. So, the older I get, the more I am inclined to think, nah, fuck that, let's just see if TWO can play this game!
    AnonymousBlogger 12/17/2017 05:54 PM
  • I'm getting them more often, too. And yeah, one can tell about the native language. Sure, there are immigrant families who come to the US and join the military as a pathway to citizenship, but still... Add to that a really WASP-sounding name, it doesn't jive...

    My latest request was a hangout chat guy who introduced himself as Davide from Southern Cali... Forgot how the convo went, but he called himself a doctor in the Army. I asked what he was training as, he just found four different ways of saying that he's a "medical specialist" If he really *was* a doctor in training from Cali, he'd know enough of the conversation to know that if I've asked a few times of his occupation, he'd have answered something like "trauma surgeon" or something. Surely there are bootleg copies of Grey's Anatomy (or even MASH) out there on the interwebs...
    OCalig 12/17/2017 01:13 PM