memes

Scams are purposely crafted with levels of sophistication to target specific levels of tech literacy.

Not saying you did, but just for all reading, never assume you're too tech savvy to get scammed. That thought is scammers literal bread and butter. Stay vigilant and curious.

Just depends on how it hits. I got a random message like

"It was great seeing you Sally, we should catch up like that more often."

My name isn't Sally. But my mom's is. And my mom is at an age where sometimes I get a TXT via email, if you get me. And she complains about her friend not understanding tech...And this friend was visiting from out of town for the first time in years, one who I had told mom to give my number too in case they needed assistance while visiting.

So I said "Hey, Maureen, this is Sue, you must have pressed the wrong button. I'm sure Mom agrees! How was the restaurant? I've been meaning to try it."

Now... That was not smart. I gave actually checks and changes real name to Sue my real name, my mom's and a well known restaurant name. If the scammer had have been smart, there's a million things they could have done with that to trick me, either immediately or by waiting awhile and then acting.

But they were on their pig butchering script, so their next TXT was clunky, and was like "oh! No this is Ally, I must have gotten the wrong number! Silly me."

And I was like. "Oh ok. No problem, glad you got to catch up with your friend then!"

And then like 2 hours later they txtd "is that restaurant in city? I've always wanted to visit."

And I didn't reply.

And the next was a hilarious cut and paste from the wiki of the city like "it has 1.9 million people and an economy of 59million annually! How cool!" Do you live there?"

By then I had figured it out.

But they do this all the time, there are alot of them, and it doesn't take much luck for your guard to go down...

If they send this to enough people, it's extremely likely that they hit someone who has recently given their number to someone new. This message hits a lot differently if you are hoping for or expecting contact from a number you don't know.
This message is actually really well crafted for targeting someone who is lonely and trying to put themselves out there.

Dude her friend is shy, and has a crush on ME!! Clearly she wants to know me and is probably my dream girl but is afraid to make the first move. I'm going to make the first move so we can fall in love and live out our happy lives selling deep fried bananas at festivals across the world. Why shouldn't I contact them??

Yes. People are that stupid.

I remember seeing a news article about this one woman that sent thousands of dollars to some scammer that pretended to be Brad Pitt. They sent her some hilariously badly photoshopped photos of Brad Pitt in the hospital and she still didn't catch on. Or she didn't even bother to like Google if Brad Pitt was actually in the hospital. Scammers don't want people that can spot a scam, they want people like that woman and boy there are plenty like her out there.

Check out Social Catfish and you will immediately see that there are more than enough people out there to fall for this stuff. They have a YouTube channel and upload pretty frequently with new investigations. Hundreds of people thinking they are dating only fans models and actors. People will sometimes even ignore all the research that they are provided with and still insist that the person they are talking to is real. Loneliness (sometimes horniness) is a hell of a drug.

Loneliness. Sometimes people just want to talk to other people and they’ll take it in any form which opens them up to being vulnerable to scams.

Smart, because spammers log which numbers have responded and put them on a hot list. Those hot lists get traded around, which will greatly increase the amount of spam you receive.

Just block and report and never respond.