Cat Fishing, online scammers – how do you know?
#1 rule: Your emotions are what’s going to get you into trouble here, and your brain is the part that gets you out of it. Your “gut feeling” will lie to you because you want it to. You have to think your way through a potential scammer situation, NOT follow ‘instincts’. You don’t have ‘instincts’ for the Internet. Your genes are not young enough to have evolved for it.
Now.
#2 rule: Scammers are everywhere. All the time. Everybody gets hit by them, but only a few people get caught in the web. Don’t be one of them. They are the norm rather than the exception. (There are Twin Flame scammers now, too, btw. In droves by my experience.)
#3 rule: Do not send money to anyone you haven’t met in person or had a very convincing video chat with on an app that you are familiar with. Make NO exceptions, ever. No prince is dying, nobody is being held hostage, the ship ain’t sinking, and their sibling isn’t in a hospital fighting for their lives.
#4 rule: Count “me toos.” Before you gasp: “Oh, we have so much in common,” pay attention to how many times the person you are chatting with has simply replied: “Oh, I love that, too,” after you have offered a piece of information about yourself. “What’s your favorite color?” “Yellow.” “Really?! Mine, too!” While in truth, similarities like this are good signs of having found the one, you have to pay attention to the time of how many times they said “me too” and how many times you said “me too.” Did they change their mind a lot when they heard what you’re into, to make brown into yellow because you preferred yellow? “Oh, now that I think of it, yellow is my favorite color, too!”
#5 rule: They’ll always have an excuse and a reason not to do certain things that would verify their identity to you. They thought this through before they spoke to you. They know what you’re going to ask and how they’re going to explain its impossibility or unfairness. They’re going to ask you to trust them, but a genuine person would try to put your mind at ease by verifying who they are. They don’t need to show you their ID unless they’re asking for money, but even if they say they’re in love with you, you have to get a confirmation of identity in a video chat, at least.
#6 rule: Their story is going to be somewhat credible. They’ve built it just for this purpose.
#7 rule: Pay attention to detail. Details matter. Don’t let them talk you out of checking their official web profiles if they claim to be someone famous. They’d want you not to look at official profiles and websites because that’s where they get caught lying. They’ll say, “It’s only PR,” “media,” “advertising,” or “public image,” and that they don’t want you to form an opinion on them on that basis, but look anyway. Their marriages are going to be “just for the cameras,” and “behind closed doors, things are different.” “Deep down, they just want to be with someone normal/ordinary.” All of this is to explain the difference between what you see in the media and what they tell you and need you to believe.
#8 rule: Girls don’t need to ask you for money. All they need to do is to mention they’re struggling financially. That’s EXACTLY THE SAME as asking a guy for money. Just because you offered money before she asked, doesn’t mean she didn’t play you to do it. Every woman knows how to do this!!! Your daughter, too, daddy. How often have you dished money at your daughter when she “ran out of money,” huh?
#9 rule: There are certain predictable angles scammer profiles take. A Christian man who doesn’t seem to be interested in a booty call but wants to marry you without meeting you because every other woman in this world is a slut, right? A beautiful woman who loves sex and treats you nicely. While both types exist, they should never ask you for money for anything, charity included, and they should not be like vampires without a mirror image when it comes to zoom calls.
#10 rule: The scammer may start with very dubious first few lines just to make sure that you are dumb enough to buy whatever crap is fed to you. Do yourself a favour, screw your head back on and go through he first few messages again. If you’re smart enough now, you might even get away with this embarrassment without having to confess to anyone what an idiot you were.
They have their reasons.
Your fantasy lover “has a job” that keeps them busy busy busy. This is so that the fact they are talking to 10 other people at the same time doesn’t get too obvious. They aren’t working on saving the world, they’re working on getting decent people just like you to give them their money.
If it’s any consolation, they’re probably feeding their family, too, and think if you want to imagine being in a relationship with an A-list celebrity, it’s a service they can provide. A celebrity dating experience for food, shelter, and maybe a proper schooling for their kids so they don’t have to scam people to survive. Your cat fisher figures that if you’re in love with an actor, this is just another form of the same; more immersive experience but you’ll still play for your theatre.
That said, nothing has ever stopped pretty women from taking money from romantically ambitious men even if you see them face-to-face on a regular basis. It’s called gold digging. It can also be done online, and a lot more comfortably, too. No need to put out, you just keep on talking.
Just because you can spot a bad scammer, maybe a good one will get you.
I gave this whole thing about 30 minutes thought. In that time, I could device a scam that I swear you would never recognize as such. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to share it, but let’s just say it was based on you proving your loyalty to me and me complaining how you don’t trust me. I’ll keep the details. It was an upgrade to the regular dumb scam that you can instantly spot. You know you spend half your time with a scammer proving yourself to be loyal… (Or talking about yourself.)
Spotting a scammer isn’t always easy. I have one experience that I took for real, but honestly I’m not sure if it was or not. “A person close to the star.” Someone, however, that isn’t SO FAMOUS that you would never believe they’d contact you. To give you an idea, when MySpace was still a thing, the star’s bandmate and I were MySpace friends on his official MySpace. Different times, give you that, but still. To be fair, he WAS scamming me, but I thought he was trying to use his famous connection to get into my pants, rather than scam me for money, something that a person in his supposed position might be inclined to do with the better-looking fans.
Check your own ego. How are they flattering your ego?
“I chose you because you’re better than Angelina Jolie.” “I chose you because you are not a slut like those other women.” “I chose you because you’re a better man than the ones I’m used to.” “I see you for who you truly are.” (Can they tell who that actually is? Can you? Let me guess: kind, loving, caring – real?)
What do you love to hear? Are they telling you that exact thing? Are you lapping this up because your false ego loves it?
Emotional manipulation: talk yourself to blinding yourself.
They’ll blame you for being cold, “too rational,” “unable to enjoy a good thing when it happens.” They’ll accuse you for not trusting them, disloyalty, for having a fear of intimacy or commitment. Undoubtedly they’ll accuse you of still being in love with your ex… All because you asked for a proof before you send them money. (Some of this applies in real life manipulation too.)
You can always turn the tide on this; “You say I don’t trust you? You can’t even trust me enough to talk to me on a video call! You don’t trust me near your people, and you say you’re in love with me? The nerve!”
Don’t be afraid of losing them. Whether they are who they say they are or not, losing someone who allows themselves to guilt trip you from wherever you’re sitting all the way to the closest church confessional, but bails on you the moment you ask a perfectly valid question doesn’t seem like something you’d like to hang onto.
Emotional support: So they’re your therapist now?
You paying for that therapy? A good listener, promises to be everything to you but can’t send you a fucking Zoom link?
There’s always some obscure situation that might almost explain it.
There’s a ton of situations that might explain what is going on with that person. Doesn’t mean it’s a good explanation, and even less that it’s a true one. Huge red flags are unusual jobs that make a person not only more alluring but also unavailable and unable to come to you when otherwise anyone could.
They’ll always have problems. Problems, problems… More problems. And most of it, they’ll want to be your problems.
100 dollars in Ghana buys you a lot of shit.
Just because they haven’t asked you for thousands of dollars doesn’t mean they’re not doing this for money. You’re also unlikely to be their only financially available friend.
Once they’ve got your number, they may just change identities.
OK, you start feeling suspicious of Fiance #1. You betcha that Fiance #2 is just around the corner. You lucky thing! And the same show starts all over. They know which buttons to press now and what not. I know what button you should press: Block and ban.
Once you boot them out and block and ban them, rest assured another identity is going to take their place. If you confront them before blocking them, you know what they’ll do? They’ll admit to it, and create some sob story that they didn’t really know how to tell you, they just wanted to buy some time to make you fall for them for real… They were going to tell you who they truly are but never got the courage… “I’m going to send you the money back but first, you have to pay this fee….”
Scammers won’t have time stalking your blog too carefully.
One would think that a scammer would scour your blogs and web profiles to the finest detail to find out what to tell you. What lie to feed. That’s more stalker territory, tho.
The opposite is more likely true. You have all this text but they just don’t seem interested, or they can’t seem to recall the most talked about things about you. It’s unlikely that they’re that interested in you, unless you’ve already sent them quite a lot of money and they want to ensure it’ll keep coming. But more likely, the more text you’ve published, the less likely they are to have read it. Videos, maybe, text. No.
There’s a type of a scam system that allows multiple people talk to multiple people under multiple profiles and get paid for it. It pays so little to the person actually replying messages, that they’ll be happy to have time for “hey I’m so happy to hear from you, handsome” before they rush to answer the next person. They ain’t going to be reading your online profiles or blogs.
Compare it to the real thing.
Now, I’m a hopeless romantic. I’m not saying at all that true love doesn’t exist, that you can’t find a soulmate, or that you cannot find faithful men and sex-loving women who would spend rest of their lives with you. I’m not saying online people are always scammers. They’re not. I can’t remember the last time I made a friend in the real world. They’re all online friends, and they’re awesome. My ex husband was an online date. Love strikes online, it does.
BUT.
Not one of those people has ever asked me for money, couple of them asked to send me money and gifts for what I’ve done for them on my websites, yes. When I search for their images online, I don’t get a 100 hits on profiles using different names.
A month. Nothing has ever taken longer than 2 weeks to happen from a promise to a delivery. From “should we meet” to actually meeting… 2 weeks. Granted, they’ve always been local in these scenarios, same country, same state. There will be a good reason for delays, and it has always been the obvious “neither one of us is rich, and we live on opposite sides of the world.”
A genuine person won’t wonder why you’d want to verify that they are a) a man/woman like they say, b) THE man/woman they say they are. These are normal questions. Normal answers do not include “I can’t take a photo.” Nobody has a phone that doesn’t have a camera anymore. And while “I don’t have a photo on this computer” might have been a good enough reason in 1998, in 2024 it’s just not a likely true reason for no photo, no video, no live chat between true lovers. At the very least, they’re not good looking enough for you, and they know it.
True Emotion Mirrors
Spiritual love is absolutely amazing. I fully believe in it… Uh. Writing something like this makes me a little sceptical of everything good in this world, but you know that’s unrealistic, too. Good things happen to good people. Fact.
True Emotion Mirrors share a lot of similarities to the perfect scammer love affair -storyline, sadly. That’s what they’re trying to mimic. Just because a movie isn’t real, doesn’t mean the story or themes are not.
Your True Emotion Mirror – and that’s the only type of relationship worth risking any of this for – cannot wait to be together with you. They want to SEE YOU with their own eyes as much as you want to see them. They won’t have excuses, they’ll have reasons, and they’ll fix those reasons for you. IF THEY ARE ABLE, they’ll be there. Granted, it will be difficult to tell whether a reason is a reason or an excuse, but try.
With a True Emotion Mirror unfakable weird things will happen. Something offline. You’ll see signs OFFLINE, even when your lover is not there. You’ll see them. I don’t need to explain what they are, you’ll see them. They’re meant for you to see them – if this is actually spiritual love rather than an imagination of it or carefully crafted manipulation of it.
A True Emotion Mirror is also always trying to liberate you rather than tangle you into their web. If you got to be who you want to be, you’d fly to your True Emotion Mirror, right? That’s why they’ll be the first to cut your ties for you, not to put more on.
Nobody is so busy they cannot call you on the phone and talk to you for hours. Video call. Visit for a weekend. Fly you over for lunch if they’re rich and famous… And not at your expense, OBVIOUSLY.
Try not to lose hope, just screw your head back on, and be a little more critical next time, yes?
Wait and see – but while you wait, don’t send money.
See how long they’ll stick around if you don’t send money. How much will the story escalate when you say no?
Her son had a sore throat and needs a doctor but she can’t afford a doctor? You don’t send money, so next thing you know it’s throat cancer and the boy’s dying. I don’t care. “Save your son, show me your face on a video app if you truly value your sons life, then, we’ll discuss money.” That’s what you’ll say. That should do it if they’re real. “I need you to buy me a smart phone.” (Nonono.) “Borrow one from the barber shop downstairs. It’s your sons life, dear.”
Only a scammer would not show their face to save their sons life, right? You can apologize later if they turn out to be real enough. Now, just make them reveal themselves before you send money or nudes… If you’re precious about your nudes, that is.
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*) Term changed after this post was originally written. Fractions of old terms may exist elsewhere in the post. Read about term updates.
**) Narcissists are Young Souls left alone to survive and they're doing their best. Their emotional age ranges from 3 to 17 -year old. The younger, the more severe the narcissism.
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