A HUGE part of each online romance scam is, of course, the romance. Some scammers are more successful at this part than others. A very few take it nice and slow and put in the time and effort to actually try to gently reel in their targets. Mine did, sort of, but very few others have. Most use a more blunt, frantic approach that is rather startling. I recently had one guy who, in under 24 hours, made contact on Words With Friends, moved us off to Hangouts, and then asked me for a gift card. This guy had no time to spare. Too bad for him, I deployed my usual tactics (including Blessing’s previously-redeemed Steam card photos), and wasted his next two days.
What I want to share today, though, are some of the most fantastic attempts at wooing that I’ve had flung at me. “Clovis Joe” was definitely the champion in that he had some really delightfully flowery messages, and he had one or two great one-liners. But he was astoundingly bad at sexting. I mean. REALLY bad at it. So bad that I didn’t even know he was doing it until he was about done. I mean.
Before we got to that, though, we had to wade through the buckets and buckets of dreck:
As you can probably tell, the hardest aspect of this part of the counter-scam is coming up with appropriate responses to each and every volley to keep him engaged. I’m also unwilling to venture too far into the realm of lies. I’ll type some encouraging tepid stuff, but I’m certainly not going to use the “L” word. I save Love for when I mean it. The same cannot be said for “Clovis Joe”.
You can see why I appreciated receiving the long email from “Roy Haskins” so that we got all of this out of the way in one fell swoop. It’s REALLY slow going when the chatting version is the MO. The juxtaposition was top-notch, though, when I received my favorite one-liner from “Clovis Joe”: “Without you, my life can be compared to a broken pencil: it is totally pointless.” He’s the champ.
But you want to see the really bad sexting don’t you? Ironically, it was the sexting that ended our time together, but not because it was so bad. It was because, even though I’m messing with these guys and their finances, I can’t mess around with sexting. Maybe it was some residual guilt about Blessing and his pictures. Maybe it’s loyalty to someone else. But “Clovis Joe” went too far, so I bailed. There also wasn’t much to stick around for:
And so I left him. Told him, “Nope, I’m done. It’s been real.” He was baffled. He got over it. Or he didn’t. I don’t know.
I’m coming to the end of my time in this occupation, though. The stakes have gotten higher recently, and yesterday I got passed up to deal with the boss. He asked me why I’m doing what I’m doing. I came up with about 7 answers, but none of them were good. None of them were enough to justify the amount of time and energy that I spend on this. So, I’m going to tap out now and return this blog to its regularly scheduled programming. I’m done. It’s been real.
Carmen Contra 