Beware of the perfect gentleman

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zmvd/beware-of-the-perfect-gentleman

by gmays • 4 years ago

155 161 4 years ago

vice.com

imwillofficial• 4 years ago

I know it’s sad and scary to get death threats.

But having a gay guy have a wide following of women in love with him is hilarious

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

But having a gay guy have a wide following of women in love with him is hilarious

Women loved Rock Hudson. I think there are a number of gay women stars that are quite popular with men.

Social media is very weird. People can have entire friendships, romances, and work relationships, without meeting the other person. I had a friend whose wife left him for an online relationship. She got to the other state, met the guy (it was not a scam), and then things didn't work out. By then, however, it was too late.

Best thing that could have happened to him. He's been happily married to another person for many years.

lelanthran• 4 years ago

Best thing that could have happened to him.

Yup. IME, the best way for a spouse to leave you is for someone else.

When they have someone that they're in a hurry to settle down with, they're unlikely to argue over splitting of assets, or custody of pets, or access to children, because they want the process over as soon as possible.

When they are leaving you because they are unhappy with you, then they'll argue over every single petty and trivial thing, and drag out the process for two years.

Sure, it may hurt more when you find out that they've been cheating, but that will still be less painful when they take out their frustration with you using the kids visitation schedule.

not2b• 4 years ago

It doesn't surprise me. Especially among men over 40, on average gay men pay much more attention to their appearance, grooming, etc. than straight men, because men whether gay or straight tend to be more visually oriented than women and looks matter to the people they want to attract. Of course like any generalization there are many exceptions to this.

logicallee• 4 years ago

I agree there are many exceptions and we have to be careful about generalizing.

It's an interesting explanation. (That gay men pay more attention to their appearance than straight men because they want to be attractive to men rather than women, and men both gay and straight are more visually oriented than women.)

This theory would predict that gay women would pay much less attention to their own appearance than straight women do (since the women they want to attract care less about looks than men do).

Do you think that's the case?

MikePlacid8• 4 years ago

among men over 40, on average gay men pay much more attention to their appearance, grooming, etc. than straight men

Men over 40 do not need to pay any attention to their appearance, grooming etc. They just need to not wear a wedding ring. (Ask me how I know...)

hoseja2• 4 years ago

Women may take interest in pictures of a well-groomed gay man.

But they would absolutely NOT tolerate their partner actually spend more time fussing about his appearance than them. Instant ick. Feminine behaviour.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

Things I didn't realize I should be thankful for #2,500,231:

My face will never ever be used for a romance scam.

Waterluvian• 4 years ago

Don’t sell yourself short. Perhaps your face, like mine, can be used kind of like the intentionally implausible stories of Nigerian scams.

autotune• 4 years ago

My face looks too much like Jack Black to be taken seriously enough by a potential romance scam victim.

pcthrowaway• 4 years ago

Soon enough, DALL-E may be able to tweak any face to make it scam-worthy, and GPT will be able to complement it to pluck the heartstrings just so

whatshisface• 4 years ago

It would be easier to start from scratch.

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

My face will never ever be used for a romance scam.

Imagine your disappointment if you ever find out that it was, and it did better than you ever did.

timrice• 4 years ago

Upsetting that in an article all about photos being used to scam people, there's not a single sample of an offending image!

I mean, I think I get why. But still, it's the first thing I want to see when I read a story like this.

toomim• 4 years ago

Yeah, I had to do a google to guess what the images might look like. https://www.google.com/search?q=James+Scott+Geras&tbm=isch

rurp• 4 years ago

Haha, yeah my thought process reading the article was basically:

- Why aren't there any photo examples?

- OK, I get why not

- But still. Couldn't they find a way to add some photos?

Balgair• 4 years ago

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Pick a few from there?

jxdxbx3• 4 years ago

Honestly it might be helpful for these guys to have a story about their situation in a relatively large publication. Just send it to people each time it happens. Works without pictures I guess

maerF0x02• 4 years ago

The woman calling the guy her fiance is pretty sad and a total failure on her parents' behalf.

You dont get engaged with or attempt to marry someone you've never met in person.

caseyohara• 4 years ago

There's a good Netflix documentary about Manti Te'o, the football player who famously got catfished while he was playing at Notre Dame. It made national news when his "girlfriend" passed away. He seemed to have a good upbringing, it's wild what gullible or desperate people can get sucked into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manti_Te'o#Catfishing_incident

Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist https://www.netflix.com/title/81580141

swivelmaster2• 4 years ago

I watched bits and pieces of this because my wife was into it, and it was absolutely infuriating. The catfisher went to increasingly ludicrous lengths to hide the sham, including getting their cousin to take a photo holding a piece of paper with their name or the current date or something like that. And the whole time, they KNEW they were in too deep but they couldn't help themselves. It wasn't a scam for money, it was just a multi-year cry for help.

bryanlarsen• 4 years ago

According the article Geras' profile was used to attract older divorced & widowed women, so I doubt the parents had much input.

etchalon• 4 years ago

Hope and love make people do wacky things.

markus_zhang4• 4 years ago

I have been constantly harrased by accounts with pretty girl pictures on LinkedIn, wish they could do something.

Why did I know they are fake?

One, I'm not handsome, neither do I work in those high status companies, why did they reach out to me?

Two, they look more like models than software engineers. Completely bullshit.

mbg721• 4 years ago

Those are just the auditors; the audit firms send charismatic and attractive people around so that the people whose work they're checking will let their guard down.

maerF0x02• 4 years ago

Also pen test teams will use halo effect when it's an option.

markus_zhang4• 4 years ago

Not really, the title is usually something like a tech consultant with completely BS educational and career experience. But I do agree it could be red team but they are annoying as hell. Actually lemme show you one:

https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/ellie-fang-411900257

cwkoss2• 4 years ago

Linkedin+Glassdoor lets you target marks based on approximate salary.

markus_zhang4• 4 years ago

Oh that's nice to know...but to what end?

dijit• 4 years ago

I have noticed that a lot of tech recruiters are conventionally attractive women.

ChuckNorris894• 4 years ago

Because sex sells. Where you not aware of this by now? This has been proven to death by now.

And by sex I don't mean the copulation act, but just seeing very handsome and attractive people that trigger your primal mating desires, works in advertising when trying to convince people to buy something from you or give you something (a product, a service, an idea, their time, their money, their attention, their assistance, etc.)

It's why many recruiters, especially in tech, tend to be the attractive female type as it works well enough on the majority male demographic this career attracts.

And why most successful sales people, and to a large degree, managers who managed to climb 'the ladder', tend to be on the tall, athletic, attractive side.

This is completely anecdotal, but I've never ever seen conventionally short males in upper management in any company I worked at so far. It's as if it was a 'jocks club' and you needed the right physique to join.

IIAOPSW• 4 years ago

Lets face it. The "pretty girl profile" strategy works on a wide enough fraction of men that with probability close to 1 you can establish a legit connection to at least a few legit people at the company. Once you get that far, you can start getting recommendations for other people you "might know" and have enough of an "in" to get a glimpse at the entire org chart of the place. From there your a short jump away from being added to internal slack channels and whatever.

Not that I've ever done this. I always respect and obey the computer fraud and abuse act of 1986 vis a vis the section on unauthorized access to a computer system.

EdwardDiego2• 4 years ago

Back in the MySpace (Bebo also maybe?) days, I met a programmer who harvested womens' profile pictures from social media for the AdultFriendFinder.com adverts on porn sites.

He didn't consider it unethical because "you'd have to be really really stupid to think that women are posting their face on a site like AFF".

I kinda thought exploiting the really stupid was still unethical, but his response was given that I worked in adtech, I wasn't really in a place to judge.

Which was hard to argue against, tbh, as I spent a lot of my time then either making popunders work again after Firefox released a new version that broke our old approach, or figuring out how to store our tracking data better.

But now that I've got a few years between me and adtech, I'm totally going to judge you hard, eug1505.

jfoster• 4 years ago

How is it a "short jump" from being connected to a few people on LinkedIn, to then being added to internal slack channels? It's not impossible, but it seems like quite a leap.

dehrmann• 4 years ago

they look more like models than software engineers

I worked with someone (she was on the sales team) who looked like a model. Her mom was a model--go figure. So while unlikely, it does happen.

stevenwoo2• 4 years ago

I remember filtering programmer resumes about 20 years ago and one listed modelling as a prior job and her packet included a headshot. We flew her out and interviewed her and she aced the written test and interviews; we made her an offer but she had multiple to choose from and our starting salary was not competitive.

jwhiles• 4 years ago

If you work at somewhat prestigious companies, you've probably worked with ex or part time models. Not many people make enough money off of modelling that they won't need another career, but being model material makes everything else in life, such as job interviews, easier.

danwee2• 4 years ago

You mean female recruiters? For some reason, all the female recruiters I know (on Linkedin) are rather attractive. Maybe there is some logic behind it.

walthamstow2• 4 years ago

My brother and his girlfriend are tech recruiters here in London.

They are both very conventionally attractive people, but it's not their image that makes them good at their jobs per se, IMO it's having the confidence and charm of a person who has gone through life always being attractive.

If a less attractive person had that confidence, charm, charisma, whatever you call it - and some do - they would also be successful.

teux3• 4 years ago

Two, they look more like models than software engineers. Completely bullshit.

Can I push back against this? It’s toxic as fuck. Being a woman in tech blows. You can’t be pretty or you’re considered incompetent and shallow. You can’t be ugly or you’re treated poorly for that.

It’s a loose-loose.

What does a software engineer look like to you, then?

mnky9800n• 4 years ago

can i push back on that? as a guy, girls texting you randomly on any platform is almost always a bot, scammer, <insert something other than what it appears to be>.

i completely agree with you, a software engineer looks like a person who writes software. but that doesn't change the online experience that i have had as a man, which is namely, if a girl texts you, she's not a girl, and she certainly isn't your friend.

3pt141592• 4 years ago

Are you a woman in tech?

The reason that I ask is that your account is pretty new and this seems a little bit like stowing up discord on social media.

Regardless. There is a difference between a beautiful woman that can code (these are actually getting more and more prevalent) and the trashy looking profile picture that all of us instantly know is some kind of spammer or scammer in our DMs or our inbox.

The fact that they're portrayed as woman has more to do with the loneliness of many men in tech than anything else and pretending that this type of behaviour is non-existent is childish when it's clear that places like LinkedIn and Twitter could do a lot more to detect it and prevent it.

BlargMcLarg4• 4 years ago

The average woman is fairly well treated and not at all like the average LinkedIn stalker, let alone a model. You're trying to bridge two related but different contexts

xwolfi• 4 years ago

ok but do you really need to look like a model on Linkedin ? You can be pretty, but is being ultra sexy really that important there ?

He didnt say they were random girls like we meet every day, he said model. When men contact me on linkedin for insurance products and they look like Calvin Klein underweare models, Im like "hum" too.

edanm2• 4 years ago

Despite you getting some bad feedback on this comment, I think you're right and I bumped on that phrase too.

This reminds me of a billboard campaign to hire developers that ran a few years ago, and featured a few SEs, including one woman considered attractive. A lot of people said things along the lines of "this isn't what a real SE looks like", along with many... less nice things. Of course, she actually was a full stack engineer at that company. This prompted her to start a campaign (#ILookLikeAnEngineer). For more details read her blog: https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/you-may-have-seen-my-fa...

Note to some commenters: I'm not saying that you can't tell a fake profile from a not fake profile. I'm saying that a sentence like "they look more like models than software engineers" is implicitly hinting that software engineers are not attractive females. That's the objection that I believe teux was raising, and it's a valid one.

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

You can’t be pretty or you’re considered incompetent and shallow

That's not a gendered stereotype, though, that's all technology people.

markus_zhang4• 4 years ago

Yes you can push back.

Of course woman in tech can be pretty. Grace Hopper is 100x more pretty than any model in the world.

dopidopHN• 4 years ago

One of my coworker looks like a barbie doll. Also for some reason she looks 30 when she’s mid 40.

She also really, really good at her job.

Her profile on LinkedIn looks like what you describe.

diego_moita2• 4 years ago

For me, the most fascinating part is about women refusing to accept they've been scammed or wanting a relationship with the men whose pictures were stolen, even though some of them are gay.

It is quite similar to cult followers like QAnon. They want to believe desperately on what is comforting discarding what is reasonable.

My Brazilian family of Bolsonaro supporters camping in front of barracks demanding a coup-d'etat is an example of it, similar to Republicans that believe in the Big Lie.

Most people love comforting and convenient lies and don't like uncomfortable truths.

rahimnathwani• 4 years ago

"wanting a relationship with the men whose pictures were stolen"

This is the plot of 'Love Hard' with Jimmy O. Yang.

thephyber4• 4 years ago

I think you are conflating System 1 and System 2 thinking (from Kahneman's _Thinking Fast and Slow_ [1]). Frauds typically work by triggering our System 1 ("lizard brain", containing our emotions and our innate mate selection/attraction) which selectively / temporarily disables our System 2 (cognitive / rational faculties). We have words to describe the abstractions in the mind ("ego", "defense mechanism") which form filters that prevent information from passing System 1 into System 2 unless our mind is open to accepting it. The entire point of these frauds is to trigger System 1 of the victim.

This article[2] was eye-opening for me in helping me understand how the brain filters information before it can reach System 2. You probably notice it when you talk to people and they reject / deflect facts that disconfirm their priors.

While I agree with you about the {QAnon, The Big Lie, Bolsonaro protesters} examples, I think people (including myself) severely overestimate _our own_ ability to withstand something untrue that tickles our confirmation bias. We all have these features, only some people have better control over their System 1 filters.

I'm fascinated by these topics because (1) I work in cybersecurity and (2) I have family members that fell into QAnon + The Big Lie. Learning about _Street Epistemology_[3] has been really interesting to help me better understand not only many of these belief systems, but how discussing them in selective ways can avoid the filters/defenses of System 1.

[1] https://suebehaviouraldesign.com/kahneman-fast-slow-thinking...

[2] https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/truth-status-and-tribes

[3] https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Street_Epistemology

diego_moita2• 4 years ago

I think you are conflating System 1 and System 2 thinking (from Kahneman's _Thinking Fast and Slow_ [1]).

Agree. Very good point. Thanks.

willi59549879• 4 years ago

I guess a reason is the time they spent having conversations with that person. If you talked for a long time you are emotionally invested and don't want to let go anymore.

andrewflnr• 4 years ago

So are the scammers already using deepfakes for this, or is that still to come? A video chat is already a pretty obvious thing to do in a long distance relationship, so it will be weird if they can't do it (building an orphanage in Africa is a pretty good excuse, but it won't last forever). If it's possible, they'll definitely want to be able to deepfake video chats.

Hnrobert42• 4 years ago

I think it is hard to generate multiple deepfake images of the same “person”.

m4x• 4 years ago

Not any more - check out dreambooth. You can train a stable diffusion model to generate images of a specific person or object quite easily now. It's well within the realm of AI art enthusiasts, even those with no technical experience.

https://dreambooth.github.io/

thephyber4• 4 years ago

You are thinking about it all wrong. Any effort to create deep fakes would be a waste of effort for the con artists.

They already know that (1) they want to avoid any type of verification attempts by the victim and (2) the relationship with each victim has a timer.

The attractive picture is just a lure (like in fishing). It only matters for the initial hook. All effort after the initial contact is directed towards building a story/narrative of the profile and latching onto the victim's emotions.

Deepfakes aren't needed. Until the con saturates the supply of victims, these cons don't need to evolve.

layman51• 4 years ago

I think about what I would do if I were in the situation of these men. If possible, I wouldn't engage with scam victims at all. This sounds impossible though because there are those situations where your workplace security team or relatives get involved. The scary thing is how this scam can happen anywhere there is a chat function, such as Words With Friends.

prawn• 4 years ago

One argument for engaging with them is that you are more likely to get some warning of a threat or head off a threat if someone sounded serious about showing up at your door.

rkagerer3• 4 years ago

When I was growing up you never posted your photo online where strangers could see it.

Earlier than that, it was also considered proper etiquette to ask before taking someone's photo.

There's been a huge culture shift and some of the outcomes are disheartening but quite predictable.

...little recourse other than to continuously report fake profiles across social media platforms

If they don't take down your fraudulent likeness or their efforts toward that end are a joke, hire a lawyer and put them in touch with the owners of the site.

jack_pp5• 4 years ago

Considering how good face recognition is these days it would be nice to have legislation in place that you have to give explicit consent to any website in order to use your image. Govt can crawl the web and block websites from the countries ISP that don't comply. Hard to see another automated solution for this problem

iLoveOncall3• 4 years ago

Indeed, that would surely stop Nigerian thiefs from using your photos. Impervious strategy.

bearmode• 4 years ago

Congrats, now 90+% of all photographs taken outside are completely unshareable online, and the > century old art of street photography is dead.

AshamedCaptain• 4 years ago

When I was growing up you never posted your photo online where strangers could see it.

I have _never_ uploaded my photo "online" voluntarily, but still it was common to put your photo in many places that were easily reachable by the common public. My school published a yearbook with my photo, for example. Many journal papers I've published had my photo attached, starting at least from the 90s.

Some of these have been digitized and thus my photo is easily reachable for anyone who searches for my full name, without me ever voluntarily uploading it "online".

Earlier than that, it was also considered proper etiquette to ask before taking someone's photo.

This much is still true, or can you imagine going around randomly flashing people with your phone on the street?

Actually I think this has improved over time. I'm far from a celebrity, but my photo is on the press -- and they never asked for permission. Nowadays, they do.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th• 4 years ago

I don't put my photo up either. I know of an old newspaper clipping that made its way online and of course yearbooks have as well.

The other way my photo has made it online is pictures with friends and family, generally facebook.

Luckily, between that and my name being shared by several people in my country who are more comfortable with online persona's, and no one is actually going to find my image unless they're trying really hard to specifically target me.

Your point is a good one and I know I'm lucky in that respect. I very much miss the days when anonymity was a major value in online interactions.

joenot443• 4 years ago

I hire a lawyer, they submit a takedown request to FB or TikTok or wherever else they’re using my identity, now what?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if someone lives across the world and is doing all this impersonation online, what legal recourse does a lawyer have access to? Drag them to The Hague?

I’ve been in cases before where someone in a different continent is trying to impersonate or sink you, and I can say in my experience there’s little a Canadian lawyer could have done.

rvba• 4 years ago

I wonder if a local lawyer can do something if the scammers' IP / country can be somehow identified. I wouldnt expect much, maybe the scammers will just switch to a different picture, what still counts as a win.

rkagerer3• 4 years ago

True it's more difficult cross-jurisdiction. Especially if the country doesn't have a robust legal system. I've had a lawyer hire another lawyer in said jurisdiction to help with enforcement across borders.

coldtea2• 4 years ago

When I was growing up you never posted your photo online where strangers could see it.

When was that? For those over 40, when they grew up there was no "online".

And if one was a kid or teenager growing up the the mid to late nineties, people had personal websites and online photos of themselves up regularly, and it wasn't considered much.

You didn't have regular snaps of your life, or pictures of the food you ate, like later, but you could well have your picture and nobody would consider it strange. Heck, even university professors and professionals of all kinds had personal and business pages with their photos on...

mcv• 4 years ago

When was that? For those over 40, when they grew up there was no "online".

There were BBSs. But I don't think anyone would appreciate trying to upload a photo through a 300 baud modem.

lsaferite2• 4 years ago

FWIW, I'm over 40 and was "online" as a teen, first with BBS and then with dial-up internet.

rkagerer3• 4 years ago

What you've described is part of the culture shift I'm talking about.

If you accept the Internet became popular in '85-'95 [1], someone 40 today would have been 3yrs to 13yrs old in that span so right in the sweet spot of their formative years.

As others pointed out, prior to the Internet there were BBS's, message boards, forums like CompuServe, AOL, etc. which were its precursors and what was known as going 'online' at the time. I did intend that to be included in my meaning when I used the term.

Of course I'm speaking from personal experiences and your own may vary. :-)

[1] https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories....

DoreenMichele• 4 years ago

My mind is blown.

Even when the ruse is revealed, many victims are unwilling to let go. The truth triggers an emotional whiplash—the promise of a soulmate, a new, fulfilling life, and mutual trust is suddenly lost, leaving the intense feelings of love behind. Once found, the real man in the photos becomes a surrogate for the fantasy. “Some of them would reach out to me and [say], ‘Now that I know what the real person is like, are you still single?’” Victor said. “‘Can I meet you? Can I FaceTime you?’”

SMH.

Time to retire Cinderella and similar stories.

MikePlacid8• 4 years ago

“‘Can I meet you? Can I FaceTime you?’”

also

even after he convinced them that they had been scammed, they sometimes wanted to strike up a friendship with him. “I can’t even tell you. I would spend an hour on the phone sometimes talking to these women

So: "Sure. Here's my 900 number".

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

In a similar vein to how it is now normal to give personal pronouns, even if you are he/she, we should normalise opsec when online dating, even if you feel it is not needed: if everyone mentions “can I check you are not a scammer and goes through a verification call”, and it is normal it wont be seen as rude or breaking the romance”.

Same should be done for a lot of interactions, such as hiring, employee to employee requests involving money, bank accounts or authorisation, and so on. With deep fakes and AI scamming will get more and more sophisticated and at scale.

MikePlacid8• 4 years ago

Time to retire Cinderella and similar stories.

The article mentions Tindler Swindler, and I can vouch - it's a great film. It is an absolute puzzle at first, cause the man spares no money to trigger a Cinderella in the victims: real charter jet, real high-class hotel, real flowers and gifts. And she has 0 at her bank account - what the man that can burn more money in a day that she makes in a year may potentially want from a poor girl, financially? Then the puzzle is solved (but I will not spoil here).

The film moves slowly and shows how the girls were hooked. And you can clearly see that they have no defense. Absolutely no defense, except to kill Cinderella inside herself, and before the fact at that.

But is it possible or correct to tell a girl "You should never date higher than your own status (whatever it is)"?

worthless-trash2• 4 years ago

You can always tell them, however most are told from youth that they should always marry upwards. Your experience may vary.

BlargMcLarg4• 4 years ago

Yes and yes. We've done it in the past for millennia now, and we recognize some will not heed advice regardless. It's a battle between recognizing women are individual agents who can make mistakes and bear responsibility doing so, or seeing them more akin to children.

Frankly, it's a necessity given the opposite is either stripping away rights (no humanitarian person is in favor of that) or somehow squashing every would-be predator (good luck doing that without a massive false positive population). We already see the latter happening today and many are unhappy about it.

The same is answered to people in similar situations the moment they become adults. Either we revisit all of that or keep the status quo.

SuoDuanDao2• 4 years ago

I don't think it's correct. There would be much less incentive for men to seek status if it didn't widen his dating pool, and a huge amount of our society's value comes from men seeking to gain status legitimately.

I think the problem comes from attraction being hackable via a particular kind of hypernormal stimulus. It should be easier to distinguish a psychopath putting on a show from someone who is stably or meta-stably in a higher status bracket than it is. People caught in these kinds of webs mention all sorts of red flags they failed to pay proper attention to after the fact, so it's not like there's no difference. And yet, we're not evolved to pay attention to the warning signs. On the bright side, the evolutionary pressure to pay attention now is pretty great.

itronitron• 4 years ago

I rewatched the movie 'Jabberwocky' recently, which has as one of the comedic story elements one or more characters that are stuck in their own particular romantic view of the world.

m000• 4 years ago

Loneliness is a bad relationship advisor it seems. It's like going to the supermarket with an empty stomach: you end up loading your cart with a lot of crap.

Btw, these scams are a worldwide trend. The wildest case I've read was about a Japanese lady scammed by a "Russian astronaut" seeking $ to pay his "landing fees" for returning to earth to meet her [1]. I've also read in local Greek news for >1 cases of ladies getting scammed by "US soldiers/officers", who at some point claim to be stranded in their deployment and ask for $ so they can travel to meet them in Greece.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ad7vn/japan-romance-scam-ru...

PM_me_your_math• 4 years ago

In addition to technical scams, lots of these relationship types come out of Nigeria and India call centers. During the day the centers sell something legitimate, like web dev or management svcs, but at night, they lock the doors and the scam crew uses the office to fleece victims.

jxdxbx3• 4 years ago

I have behaved very strangely myself when heartbroken.

m463• 4 years ago

This is probably the most real comment I've read today.

dsfyu404ed• 4 years ago

My mind is blown.

It shouldn't be surprising that the ~50% of the population that is stereotyped over centuries as having an unhealthy relationship with "being wrong in a relationship" and "not letting things go" makes good on that stereotype frequently enough to be worth an anecdote in a Vice article.

robocat• 4 years ago

As a tech guy, I would write some web pages with my image and textual explanations of the scam, then SEO optimise them for reverse image search. Hypothetically, of course, since I will never need to do it for myself as I am definitely not handsome enough.

I wonder why the guys didn't want their faces in the article? That way any reverse image lookup could find the story, the victims would know without getting in touch with the guys, and the scammers would move on to other guys' faces. That would solve the problem for those guys at least!

koonsolo• 4 years ago

Most people don't even know that reverse image search exists.

kuhewa2• 4 years ago

Presumably all the women contacting the photo guys in the article are aware of it.

The real issue is that the women aren't going to believe it if it doesn't link to a social media profile or similar, or if they don't talk to the person, and the scammer would easily explain the website away if they were aware of it.

saagarjha• 4 years ago

The article explains that the women often have a hard time letting go after realizing they’ve been scammed.

thephyber4• 4 years ago

I wonder why the guys didn't want their faces in the article?

These guys get frequent death threats. It's reliving trauma.

That would solve the problem for those guys at least!

That's how therapy is supposed to work. You just asked "why don't people just face their fears in therapy RIGHT NOW and get it over with?" The answer is "because people have emotions".

Sadly, emotions are also the reason these fraud schemes work.

shawn-butler• 4 years ago

From a technical perspective why isn't this a solved problem?

Identity will always be a difficult problem, but being able to own your own face / likeness by demonstrating it should be technically possible right?

Forced visual "captchas" something like "please take a photo standing on one foot and your finger pointed at your nose"

Then once you own your likeness with "faceID" likeness similarity isn't it then easy to monitor the images uploaded to the profile or am I completely missing something?

pugworthy• 4 years ago

I think there are some privacy issues here you're not addressing. Like exactly who gets to be the authority on face ID? What if it gets leaked or hacked?

Not to mention the near future triviality of image generating AI being able to just recreate what you're asking it for a "capchat". I mean once it figures out hands that is.

superhuzza• 4 years ago

Because this isn't inherently a technological problem, it's a loneliness and emotional vulnerability problem.

I guarantee you that scammers will find ways to convince their victims regardless of photos being verified or not.

acdha• 4 years ago

It’s a question of cost. Facebook has a billion users, if they can save $0.10 per user someone just got a promotion.

Here’s a related question: every day, people lose access to their Google or Facebook accounts. This could easily be solved with some process where they could get a third party (librarian, notary, police or DMV, etc.) to do an ID check. Nobody does this because the cost would be greater than zero.

ryandrake• 4 years ago

“‘You shouldn’t have anything on social media. People are using your pictures.’ And I’m like, ‘Excuse me. I’m not gonna move to a deserted island or live my life as a monk. That’s just not gonna happen.’”

Not posting pictures of yourself online seems to be a pretty reasonable, sensible preventative measure for anyone. I don’t (to my knowledge) have pictures of myself floating around social media, and I don’t consider myself to be “living my life as a monk.”

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

Not really since anyone else can post a picture of you. Work dos, nights out, even incidental picture of you in someone elses tourist photo. Maybe you wont be mentioned by name in the photo but maybe you will.

kuhewa2• 4 years ago

I don't reckon the intended meaning is that it is literally impossible, but that it is an unfair and likely ineffective way to prevent romance scamming. His visage is used because they have already farmed the pictures, probably because there were quite a few available so enough to titrate them out over several weeks. So it doesn't really make sense that he now has the duty to remove his online presence, which is important to many people's expression of themselves. In fact, the ability to find him online probably has ended a number of these scams and prevented the women from losing even more money.

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

Other than for a new driver's license and a passport, I haven't even taken a picture of myself since 2014. I do some fantasy cosplay, though, so have had pictures taken of me from that, though I'm not sure many would recognize me.

jxdxbx3• 4 years ago

I find it so much more sad when people fall in love and get their hearts broken, than some dude who is scammed just looking for sex.

tasuki• 4 years ago

I find it curious that people fall in love with a person they'd never met.

rendall• 4 years ago

I've always got scammers trying to get to me on Twitter. Once, I went down the road a bit to see what would happen. So, so boring. No conversational skill, no chemistry, just whoever happened to be working the shift at the time. I did wonder if the girl in the pictures was associated with the gang somehow, or just a random victim, as in the article.

RickJWagner• 4 years ago

Of interest: "The male voice, tinged with a Southern-sounding accent, stopped him cold: I’m going to slit your throat."

What would you think if Vice had written:

"The male voice, tinged with a Black-sounding accent...."

"The male voice, tinged with an Asian-sounding accent...."

"The male voice, tinged with an Italian-sounding accent...."

Why of course you'd think "That publication is hate mongering! They're trying to subtly guide the reader to bad thoughts about their target!"

Which is exactly true.

BlargMcLarg4• 4 years ago

"Remember kids, discrimination is wrong, unless X" ~ practically every society in history believing they can determine X and would scoff at both their ancestors and predecessors.

Vice just having a little slip of the tongue and showing what's really up.

NackerHughes• 4 years ago

Interesting and telling indeed. A southern US accent is acceptable to portray as threatening (or unintelligent or otherwise villainous). I would say the Russian accent is similarly A-OK to use for such prejudice. Racial stereotyping is exempt from being considered hate speech, it seems, when the target is the Bad People™.

coorski• 4 years ago

beware of vices

Beware of the perfect gentleman

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