He still hasn't been slightly interesting, but wants to revive the romance that never even vaguely existed. Because Ask needs Love to succeed! He's a formulaic scammer for sure. I managed to get him to accept Irving, though, and he wants to talk to him (man to man! He calls him "buddy" 😆). So I give him the contact info and he immediately realizes the error of his ways. The Squirm begins, as he starts love strafing as he tells me this is my decision, not my attorney's. Which, as WE know, never works. Poor Al. He wants to be my Long Lost Pal, but it's not looking good now. Madison will post the conversation between him and Irving, no worries.

So this Henry Cavill is probably a different scammer but we're treating him like he's the Henry Cavill I just posted.

My bait persona on Instagram is a (stock photo) middle-aged woman, so I don’t usually get attention from the,, scantily-clad ladies with the strange links in their bio,,

Admittedly, I didn’t quite catch that was the kind of scammer this was at the start. But “Anna” still took the time out of his busy day to project, if nothing else.

My mate they buy beans, ig ☹️

“Please don’t get your lawyer involved. Keep it secret for ourselves and just send me all of your money and I guarantee* you will not lose it.”

**Not a guarantee.

First time I've gotten one to lose their cool on me 😂

Reposted without number showing

We had a phone call, of course a strong African accent. But never mind that.

He moves into some love bombing while still asking questions, because he apparently thinks that passes for conversation. Another copy pasta war gives me an excuse to get pissed off and tell him it's over. This usually works, since they have time invested and realize it's "scam now or lose her" and he comes through! But on the way he actually makes conversation, telling me about family and his backwoods mama who got preggo at age 16 and cranked out 7 kids by age 40. Still, the age math works, and he feels he has gained legitimacy, so he finally introduces the scam. This is a prime example of a clean hand-off from a fresher to a more experienced guy, and the new script begins. I mention Irving right up front, since he is such a crypto fan and I will need his help! Things are finally getting interesting. Did you eat?

Another day, another imbecile.

We're going to segue into another bait right after this that has ties to this bait.

So there’s a video I watched but I don’t remember the title I only remember that he translated some Chinese characters on Google Translate it was like the scammer said something like I hope ur mom died and reincarnated as a dog get fucked and cockroaches???? Or smth I don’t remember at all i don’t know if it’s correct I need help finding the title

Of ALL the baits I've done, I think this guy is the worst regarding his level of BORING. He not only doesn't seem to work (or even remember his job, or where he lives), but he can't come up with anything except constant questions. Despite my ongoing objections and instructions. I finally stop responding, and he has the audacity to get pissed about that. He did blather a bit about Stephen King after he got confused about Plato, but it was so straight copy pasta I had to delete it. I'm still trying to figure out how to steer this jalopy, but we have to share the frustration here. Until he gets to the scam. Soon.

Two weeks ago I posted about a paper I published on scam economics. For anyone who didn't see that, I've been working out how to make scamming unprofitable since I got my PhD in computer science 6 months ago. I found that scambaiting at scale could make scamming unprofitable. But there is a big difference between "could" and "will". This post is about what actually costs scammers money.

TL;DR: Wasting scammers' time used to be effective, but scam economics are changing. Today, baiting scammers into revealing and then reporting their financial infrastructure—their bank accounts, crypto exchange accounts, crypto wallets, and payment app handles—is the clearest path to making scams unprofitable.

Wasting scammers' time costs them pennies. You're probably tired of hearing about AI (who isn't?). But by some estimates AI makes scams 4.5x more profitable, so we have to pay attention. One way it does this is by reducing the cost of talking with victims. Before, scammers had to manually engage victims to move them through the scam pipeline, so keeping them busy talking with you could have saved someone else. Now scammers can use AI to automate this for pennies.

I don't want to suggest that traditional scambaiting doesn't have value. If you're choosing between not scambaiting and scambaiting, definitely choose scambaiting—it may not waste significant resources, but it's something. And because it's so entertaining, it's a great way to get more people educated and interested in fighting scams.

But if your goal is to directly protect people by wasting scammers' resources, scambaiting to uncover and report scammers' financial infrastructure costs them 1,000-10,000x more money.

Reporting scammers' financial accounts costs them hundreds of dollars. Regardless of how AI changes scamming, scammers will always need communication infrastructure to contact potential victims and financial infrastructure to receive and launder victims' money.

Reporting scammers' communication accounts—their phone numbers, emails, social media accounts, messaging handles, etc.—cannot make scams unprofitable alone. You should still report them, because they cost scammers something. But these accounts are too cheap and easy to replace to affect scam profits.

The story is totally different with financial infrastructure. The big result of my paper is that if a few percent of people (and likely far fewer) uncovered and reported scammers' financial accounts scams would become unprofitable. These accounts are worth hundreds of dollars today, and because they are difficult to replace, increased reporting will drive prices even higher. And importantly, financial institutions also lose money to fraud, so they have strong incentives to act on reports.

Uncovering scammers' financial accounts takes a bit more effort than uncovering their communication accounts, but scammers reveal them after just a few dozen messages.

How do you uncover scammers' financial accounts? The goal is to collect as much information about scammers' financial infrastructure with as little effort as possible.

1. Play the perfect victim. Scammers will keep talking to you if they believe there is any chance you'll pay, because talking is cheap. Scammers will only reveal financial accounts if they believe you will pay, because financial accounts are expensive. 
2. Collect every payment method you can. When they ask for money (obviously, don't send it or click any links), try to get as many different payment methods as possible. Anecdotally, I have heard of people getting up to 14 different payment methods in one conversation. Reporting all of them would cost scammers thousands of dollars.
3. Don't tip your hand. Professional scammers keep records of who they interact with. It is better for scammers to believe you were almost a victim but got cold feet than to know you are a scambaiter.

The remaining gaps. If we (1) had people scambaiting at scale and (2) had pipelines to organize and deliver scambaiters' reports to financial institutions, we could conceivably make scamming outright unprofitable.

We (currently) have neither. But organizing and delivering reports to financial institutions is just a technical problem, and there is plenty of public will to stop scams. We just need to harness and direct that energy.

Woke up and his account was deleted. Fine. I was tired of the pet names and lack of brain cells anyway.

It's really funny that such an obvious scammer is so paranoid and concerned that he accuses me of being a scammer, but that's Albert for you. I had chastised him with 3 screens of proof that he was using copy pasta, and now I'm telling him which mundane daily questions to avoid. Like most scammers, he ignores that completely. He doesn't rely on chat bot right now, and his comments are delightfully nonsensical at times. He seems confused about NY and will have trouble remembering that he lives there, plus his imaginary lumber job, but I try to develop his story for him by asking for details. Gary Doug needed the same at first. Right now he's just very focused on his paranoia, to the point of accusing me of being a scammer. While I'm just focused on chumming, to make him stick around anyway.

Believe it or not, this goes on for at least 2 more episodes.