Scamming A Scammer
- jim Young
“There are many scams on Facebook now. Send me $19.95 and I will tell you how to avoid them.” - anon
If you’re on Facebook chances are that at some point, if you haven’t already, you’ll be cloned by a Facebook Imposter. At the very least, you’ve likely witnessed several of your Facebook friends falling victim to Facebook cloning.
Facebook imposters are the lowest of the lowlife among hackers, scammers and thieves. They are uneducated, unintelligent scum with no morals and no conscience. Their skill set doesn’t extend beyond their ability to clip and paste. Many of them cannot spell and their grammar can be atrocious.
Most of all, they are too stupid to realize that most people on Facebook are onto them and they have about as much chance of successfully pulling off their scam as they do winning the lottery.
They are not particularly dangerous but they are annoying. They are as annoying as a swarm of mosquitoes at a nudist colony.
Generally speaking the mothers of Facebook Imposters are not proud of them.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t serve some purpose. When you’re bored with nothing to do, they can be a great source of amusement.
My sister was recently cloned on Facebook. Rather than simply report the imposter to have his cloned profile deleted, I decided to have some fun with him.
After accepting the imposter’s friendship request under my sister’s profile, instead of waiting for him to approach me for money, I decided to offer my money to him up front by pretending that I had lost contact with my sister and was eager to repay her the undisclosed amount of money I owed her.
So I messaged the imposter the following text.
It took him a little while to respond. Probably because he was still busy sending out friend requests from my sister’s cloned profile, but eventually the imposter took the bait. Did I mention how stupid these guys are?
There were no pleasantries involved.
No “Nice to hear from you.”
No “How’ve you been?”
No “So glad you reached out to me.”
The imposter just went for the throat asking if I had all the money I owed, and how much that was.
I decided to be a bit vague and put him on the spot.
At this point he got a little demanding.
“No problem” I was thinking. I just needed to know where to send the money.
At least he’s being very accommodating. I should send him a “thank you” card. I was hoping to get both an email and a mailing address from him.
I could almost hear him saying, “No thanks are necessary… just send cash.”
Scammer’s love Gift Cards. No identification is required to spend them and they are non-traceable.
I really do live in the middle of nowhere, so I decided to draw on my real life experience.
Things were starting to get real.
And BAM. There it was. The contact information I was hoping to get.
I don’t know if this is this Facebook Imposter’s real name and email address or not, but I haven’t bothered to redact the information because I don’t care who might contact him. If you want to send him an email and let him know what you think of this scumbag and his chosen profession, have at it.
But the fun wasn’t over yet. I’m sure he felt he was pretty close to getting some money from me so I decided to make him sweat a little first.
I thought I blew my cover by suddenly questioning whether or not he was my sister. I probably should have asked something like, “I don’t recall you using that email address before.”
Have I mentioned that Facebook Imposter’s generally aren’t all that bright? He didn’t seem to catch on.
Instead he fell right back on a textbook response all scammers use when an email comes into question. It can be found on Page 93 of “Scammer’s For Dummies”.
I could have had some more fun and made him sweat a little more by asking things like
“Who is Bammeke?” “Have I met him before?” “What kind of car does Bammeke drive?” “Is that the guy that tried to scam you out of some money a year ago?”
But by this time I was getting bored and ready to start wrapping things up.
Instead we got into a little “Who’s on first” routine by going around in circles about how much money I was to send him.
I decided it was time to break the news to him that I didn’t really owe my sister that much money. While he was likely hoping it was in the hundreds or thousands, I was talking about a substantially smaller loan.
The imposter who was pretending to be my sister felt he was owed a little more and had no problem letting me know.
Now, I get that he wanted more than $5. He could easily have asked for $10 and might have made a case. Why was he asking me “How much I wanted to send?” I thought I had already answered the question. I’m not an unreasonable guy, I’ll negotiate. I decided to up it a notch and give him the opportunity to play a “guilt” card on me.
If he thinks I’m trying to make amends to my sister, he’ll feel that I can be taken advantage of. Taking advantage of people is his life, after all.
Now I was pissed off. How dare my sister… I mean this Facebook Imposter justify charging me $1000 for a cup of coffee and a donut that I bought him?
“Wait just a minute now,” I thought to myself, “He IS offering me a $500 break. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all. I better just keep my cool before I blow this really good deal.”
But my temper got the best of me. I had to open my big mouth with that “your mother would be proud” thing again. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. So I continued immediately with the following.
I gave Bammeke the opportunity to come clean and admit he really wasn’t my sister and apologize for trying to extort some money from me but he never wrote back. I almost felt like I had lost my sister again… except of course I hadn’t been estranged from my sister in the first place.
I reported this Facebook Imposter to Facebook and blocked him from my profile although that last step wasn’t really necessary as Facebook was quick to eliminate him from Facebook existence for probably about 20 minutes until he moved onto his next victim.
As I suspected, even with his email address, the North Bay Police advised me there wasn’t really anything they could do with that.
Maybe a mailing address would have been of more use, but in today’s crazy mixed up world of law and order, I probably would have been seen as the perp for trying to entrap Bammeke.
I did however report the details of this to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. They don’t actually chase the criminals themselves but at least Bammeke’s name, email and miserable little attempt to take me for my money will be on file and hopefully provide them with data that may be of use in helping them fight the overall problem.
In the meantime, I had some fun and isn’t that what Facebook is all about?
If you want to learn more about Facebook Imposters, how they operate and what to do to stop them, you can read my article Facebook Imposters - A Form Of Identity Theft.
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