Multinational Crisis Part 5

If you had no idea there were people trying to defraud women and men online, you probably have been on a long staycation in the jungles of the Amazon, or you live under a rock. This is happening everyday and hundreds and thousands of times a day to as many people.

If you are not the victim of a scam, then it is someone you know or a family member. Of this, I have no doubt. None. Please don’t get indignant if you have gone undisturbed by this fraud, because it is harming people, it causes decreased self worth and self esteem. It also causes depression, fear, and devastation. It is no laughing matter and should not be dismissed.

On that note, if and when you come across a person who has undergone the tragic changes to their lives because of some romance grift, be kind, for heaven’s sake. These crimes, have no color, no race, no specified sex preference. The crime is non discriminating. At least something in this world is. Not a consolation, I know. It does not work on the ignorant (stupid) only, scams get intelligent and perfectly capable people. The same goes for women versus men. Both sexes are being targeted.

Understand that these men and women speaking with an imposter, are maybe naive, but not dumb. The scammer is adept at this game. They have the power of the internet behind them, crypto currency, and now, the wonderfully new fly in the ointment of Ai.

Ai is dangerous, make no mistake about it. It moves information and technological advancement into a new millennia and uncharted waters. No more can you trust a voice of a human. Those can be altered and made so real, you would die on your sword, arguing it was real. No more can you trust a video chat, or call, or message, Ai can manipulate everything you see.

I have a confident in Nigeria, who sent me video of a live video chat session between a person ( a regular person) and a famous movie star. The video showed the scammer in his seat in front of the camera and computer screen. It also showed the person “on the other end of the video call”, and third computer, running the Ai program that changed the scammers features and voice, to that of the actor. What the recipient saw was the actor in live time, speaking to them as if it was you and your mom having a FaceTime call. No lie!!

The flaws were so minimal, that a person would have to be looking for them very carefully to see them. Backgrounds can be manipulated to appear genuine. What I mean by that is, if a celebrity scammer, chatting via video, were to be chatting with you, and say they are at a bistro in Paris, that is exactly what you would see, behind them. Other people, traffic breezes, all looking real, but not real. If I had not seen it, I would have doubted it. It was scary.

I cannot say this enough, trust nothing you hear or see on the internet anymore. I know everyone has seen or is seeing many new reels for incredible things that are all Ai. Anything from amazing animal acts, to amazing views of storms, and accidents, are being watched everyday. Some of the makers of these clips are becoming very rich making them. Cats driving, Jesus swimming at a meet but running on the top of the water, space videos, and so on, are spilling all over the place. While those are funny and amusing, scams are not.

Texting or chat is fun, but it is being used for evil. Celebrities, actors, musicians, military generals, reality tv stars, do not chat with anyone they don’t know online, in private or otherwise. They do not use Telegram, MS Teams, Signal, Zangi, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Lemon8, TikTok, WhatsApp, or any app to have private conversations with YOU! They choose a different place to have that secret conversation with you, to sites that have very little protections and guards against fraudulent activity. Most, if not all allow the participants to mask or hide their phone numbers. By the way the country code for Nigeria is 234 if you see a phone number, though most of the time now, they have legit-looking American phone numbers. You can thank proxy servers for that, and VPN. The chat sites can be used for good, and certainly they are, but most of these will not protect you the victim. They will protect anonymity.

Do not trust social media. If they are making a buck, they never saw an infraction. And they see nothing when it comes to these cyber crimes. Now, go ahead a post a boob drawn in watercolor and you’ll think you committed a capital crime. This is the idiocy of the internet. They are more worried with the business account that did not use royalty free music in their ad, than the thousands of profiles of each personality. This seems ludicrous to me. A computer can run an identification program, a name scan, and go through its own data base for redundancies, but it can’t see and find two hundred actors with the same name and profile picture? That is beyond ridiculous. We all know it should be done.

So what can you do if no one has your back? Be proactive. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. COMPLAIN! REPORT! CONTINUOUSLY!

Complain, report, and expose every single incident. Do it to the platform, post it on the celebrity, general, or anyone else’s page that has been used. Do it often and every time you see it happen.

One of the best ways to put a dent in this activity, is to WARN. ALERT, WARN AGAIN, everyone you see engaging in comments, with a profile name that is the same as the person, whose page you are viewing. What I mean by this is, you make a comment and then someone clicks like or makes a comment on your comment, and you notice, actor so and so, has all these women commenting, followed by replies from said actor, but with another profile pic or no pic at all. Many times the name will have numbers after it (i.e., Joe Shmoe263). Imposter! Message the women or men you see that have been contacted, and tell them. If you, yourself have been scammed, don’t hide it, let them know your experience. Don’t let the opportunity go by. If you see a manager, public relations, secretary, internet relations person, saying they can get you or anyone in touch with the celebrity, report them and block them and warn anyone engaging with them. These are all scammers.

The tactics that are being used, change as they wear out the usual suspects. I have experienced them all so far. Actors, their varying staff, their mothers, their children, their charities, are all used to get into your wallet and under your skin. Shameful right?

The drama they give you to ask for help, changes too. From they need to get to their kids, or send something to their kids, to mothers texting you for help because their “son/daughter” the celeb is in the hospital or had an accident, and they need your help, to accounts being frozen for reasons from legal to wives or ex lovers taking their money or accounts. They get so creative and believable sometimes. Remember that they make a crap ton of money and will never need your measly dollars to do anything. They have people for everything, even money managers.

Military officers, don’t ask civilians for help. They don’t get into money problems and ask strangers for money or crypto. That is a violation of their code.

With any and all new people in your message boxes, go to the profile. Take a screenshot, look at their friends list. Look at their posts. Look at their profile pic and any and all conversations on their page. You will begin to see patterns. Low followers, vague postings or postings of things you have seen all over the internet on a google search. But be aware, none of these ideas are foolproof or stagnant. I have seen people with verified badges, knowing they are fake. They have people that can do that. I have seen profiles with millions of followers on a profile made one day before. They can manipulate that as well. I have experienced them pretending to be children of a person, being permitted to chat with you, and the whole time you have been speaking to a child that was paid to type what they were being told, but obviously in a child’s vernacular.

You won’t determine validity of a person by speaking their “language” to them, They use google translate. It does not end.

If all else fails and you are targeted again and again like I was, get wise. Stop viewing the person’s site, page, reels, postings, or anything related to them. Unfollow, click uninterested if you see a posting flash on your feed, and so on. They will still find you and try you, but the traffic will slow. I used to get between 10 and 20 hits daily for a single entity that I followed or made a comment on.

Now, after this entire year and well over 200 (more like 250 by now), people targeting me, for a single celeb, it has slowed. Not ended. Slowed. The difference is, that now I do not reply to them, I post the words I gave you all in these posted articles, and follow it to the letter. I have unfollowed every celebrity or famous person, that was used in order to scam me, and I do not engage, no matter what, on any sides of that coin.

The most important thing is get the message out there. DO NOT be ashamed. Be bold. Take pride in helping others with your experience. Feel good about yourself for figuring it out, at any stage of the scam, and for helping others avoid it. Be an advocate. If you can spare one, you have accomplished something honorable and to be proud of. Own it.

There is no way to stop this mess. The only way, would be for these men and women defrauding hundreds of thousands, to take control of their nation and demand better from their government, to demand a different government, and to want to be better people. They have to want to get out of this like of criminal lifestyle enough to invoke change. Barring that, they will continue to be oppressed by corruption in their governing people.

We cannot do much, the celebrity is not doing much if anything, the social media, well, forget about them being active participants in quelling cyber crime. Not even the FBI or Interpol can keep up. I have a contact in the FBI, and they are overwhelmed. They can’t get them all, and only get a few.

Before I say adieu, I want to say this. Pay attention. The Nigerian people are really wonderful people, in a desperate situation. If you were starving and living in a home with dirt floors, you might be desperate enough to do shady things too. Remember that. Even the scammers are lovely people when they shrug off the lies and get real with you. They are humble, sweet, and sadly naive about the world around them. They know only extreme poverty and this.

Not all are this poor, not all commit crimes on the internet, not all scam without impunity. Many yes, but not all. I have seen some of these men, get out of this work, just by being kind and explain to them, what they are doing to their victims. I have encouraged them to change, and a couple have. That is a little something. A drop in the ocean.

No one wins in these scams. There is no winning. The only way to win, is not to play at all.

I will answer any questions I see in the comments on these posted articles, and on any site. Women, men, anyone. So if you are unsure of something, ask. If this has happened to you and you need to vent, vent. I came to do this, in order to be there for you. I am present.

Thank you for sticking with me and for using your valuable time to read this series. I appreciate it, sincerely.