Grieving Mother Wants You Happy

The Russian internet sometimes brings me a lot of joy and surprises. Here’s the translation of the smartphone Messenger exchange in the cover image for this story:

[Masthead: Sweet son, online today at 5:17 pm.]

Son at 5:10 pm: Mama, my plane is falling!

Mother at 5:10 pm: What’s happened?????????

Son at 5:13 pm: Mama, I must tell you something very important !

Mother at 5:13 pm: What’s that, honey? [3 bawling emojis]

Son at 5:15 pm: All this time, I had a software program that made me all my money! And now I want you to know about it and tell other people!

***

Then the main Facebook post from a Svetlana Leontieva reads as follows:

My son died in a plane crash 20 hours ago [so today has not yet ended, in case anyone noticed the masthead]. [praying hands and plane emojis].

For the last several months of his life, he was traveling the world, while making good money. He was happy, but such is life… I am running on empty now, but am writing this text on my emotions, as he wanted this so much… My sweet son [crying emoji].

As I already said, for the last several months he was living the life of his dreams. We couldn’t even imagine, how our son, who’d worked an ordinary job, managed to be so successful. Several times, he… [read more]

Since I got this as a still image from a friend who is now most probably asleep due to the time difference with Russia, I decided to do my own research.

I found the grieving mother’s FB page:

There’s not much in her feed as the page was set up as “Cause” (meaning for fundraising and sponsored messages) on August 13, just a week ago.

Her feed has no posts beyond the cover photo and a couple of other pics. Immediate red flag. 0 likes, 0 followers is another one.

Here’s what you’ll see if you click on “About this page”:

So the person’s address and phone number are from Brooklyn, NYC (lots of Russian immigrants live there) but email is still based in Russia. Since the page is still running ads and thanks to the FB transparency policy, I was able to dig out the rest of the sponsored message that was cut off at the beginning of the story under [read more]:

It basically says that her son made on average $1K a day on YouTube, simply by watching the videos on a specially designed platform. Before he died in the crash, he wanted to share this way of making money with as many people as possible. Such a generous soul.

When I clicked on the link to the platform, it immediately wanted me to register by providing sensitive personal information. I of course closed the tab right away.

Now, I may have stumbled upon something genuine: the infamous Russian internet troll network that recruits people to watch ads and videos on YouTube to run up the views counter. Since the number of views is still used as the main metric for advertising “effectiveness” on YouTube, bot farms still recruit real people rather than unleash AI bots for the purposes of creating authentic viewership.

It is more likely, however, that it’s just another small-time scam that would require you like $20 in registration fees and then sell your bank information on the dark web.

In any case, I was not about to find out.

I just find it so incredibly cheesy and silly: Are there people in the world who’d really believe that her son’s dying wish would be to share a quick-rich scheme with the rest of the world?

The people who design these scams must be marketing geniuses. But horrible writers.