I scammed a scammer and feel terrible about it

I’ve always had a great capacity to do the dumbest things.

It’s how I came to possess, among all my other weird collectables, a postcard sent to me by the dictator of Panama, General Manuel Noriega, from his time in maximum-security lockup in the US. I also own a bag of whistles given to me by former president of the United States, Martin Sheen, as well as a wonderful handwritten letter about knitting from Raiders of the Lost Ark star, Karen Allen.

I suppose I have a contrary nature. I like to “push back” and go the opposite direction in which people normally travel. If they elevate a star, I pull them down to earth. If they shun a person, I strike up a friendship. If they avoid a confrontation, I walk straight into it. 

This is nowhere more applicable than on social media where I have a very small following but do seem to attract a fair number of young women, dressed seductively, eager to communicate with me. Everybody I know blocks or reports them because we all know they’re scammers. I, on the other hand, embrace the scam, even though I’m sure I’m chatting to a room full of men in a bot-farm in downtown Leningrad.

Tuesday had been a very tough day, but I reached the evening relieved it was behind me. It left me in a good mood. So when I received a message from a new follower that began “Hello Mr Dave”, I thought I’d play along. It’s quite liberating to create a narrative on the spur of the moment. I was suddenly a 42-year-old widower whose wife was recently killed in a tragic pedalo accident after drifting into the path of a Polish herring boat off the seafront of Dudley…

The pattern of the grift is always the same. They send you a few polite words and express a firm commitment to the sanctity of marriage and the covenants of the Church of Rome. Then they send you a picture of them dressed in a saucy sailor’s outfit. There’s something touchingly gullible about what they assume you’ll believe.

It follows that they eventually ask to see what you look like, so I usually nip over to This Person Does Not Exist to snag myself a photorealistic computer-generated face, indistinguishable from the real thing.

With the introductions complete, our night turned romantic. “Shantel Brown” found me very handsome, loving, and possessing three factories in the Midlands making squid-flavoured party nibbles, the party treat that you can either eat or stick to your face. (I remain stupidly proud of “Squidables” for which I will be soon seeking investment.)

The scam operates on the basis that the scammer never contradicts anything you say so I find it a liberating exercise in comedic free association. 

She said she was in Florida. I asked if she’d seen any flamingos.

She said yes. She saw some when she went hunting.

I said hunting flamingos sounded dangerous. I wondered if they tasted nice.

She said they did and we were soon planning a new spicy flamingo-flavoured party nibble called Flamingables.

At some point, the scammer will usually ask for money to keep the conversation going but this time I’d already “ordered” her a £22,000 gold necklace from Tiffany’s so she was playing it calmly. The address she’d provided was in Florida, though a quick Google search told me it was the home of a 68-year-old Republican resembling Rosanne Barr and not a 29-year-old lingerie model. It was clearly a big operation. These gangs usually employ somebody to intercept the mail going to many rented mailboxes/apartments, the contents of which are fed up the chain.

A few more saucy pictures followed to which I expressed mild disappointment but the whole point of this was to lead me into my usual endgame.

Google has a little-known feature called a “reverse image search”, which allows you to upload any image and Google will tell you where it came from. So, when the scammer sent a photo, I quickly found the gallery from which it was taken. Then, at some point, once they start to get frustrated that I’m not impressed with what they’re offering, I will start to send photos back to them, taken from the same gallery.

“I was hoping you’d send me this photo,” I’ll say, expecting an expletive in return and the end of our affair.

Yet what is remarkable is that every single time I’ve done this, the truth never fazes them in the slightest. They carry on playing along, such is their investment in their fantasy. I can even explicitly state that I know it’s a scam and they’ll never get a penny from me and yet they still carry on.

Or, at least, that’s what usually happened before I met “Shantel Brown”.

Perhaps it was my mood or the tone of my replies but, somehow, someway, I managed to pull down the scammer’s mask. One moment I was joking with my Twitter followers (I always provide a live commentary) about the likelihood of my talking to some gang in a sweaty office in Calcutta. The next moment I’m looking at an actual selfie of my scammer.

It was a young woman in Ghana.

I felt awful.

She was trying to steal money from me, yet it was me feeling lousy that I’d drawn her into the light.

People would later remind me that she’d instigated the scam, but I felt like it was me who had perpetuated the only real theft of the evening. The only thing of value taken was her identity and an insight into her dreams for a better life.

What do you say in such a situation? You say that she’s far more interesting than the pornstar she was pretending to be. You say her honesty is good and it proves that she’s not a bad person. You say you are sure that there are better things she could be doing… And perhaps you believe some of the things you say as you say them. I know I certainly did.

In return, you hear a story that is alien yet also familiar. It’s the story that has spread like a virus through generations and across the globe. She wants to become famous, though like the youth in this country, fame is not something she seeks as a consequence of having some skill. She just wants to be famous for being famous. That’s why she pretends to be this “famous model”.

The fame was only one part of it. The rest was a deeply warped sense of sexuality, of what men demand and women are supposedly happy to provide. It was the worst amalgamation of the modern pornification of relationships, a get-rich-quick culture, as well as some perverse notion of the Bible, which she told me the British had introduced to her country, which meant that everything I – as “a man of faith” – had told her had to be true.

Yet, perhaps the most shocking of all, was that the grift never ended. Even after the façade came down, I remained her “sweetie” and the attempts to form a relationship persisted until the very end. I gave her some advice which I’m sure was deeply patronising. Some would say I demonstrated the evil of paternalism or even colonialism by measuring this girl’s life by the standards of my own. How can I, living in the UK, advise a young woman working as a Twitter sexbot in Ghana?

She wished me goodnight and said we’d talk in the morning and that she loved me.

I said goodnight and then this big, warm-hearted humanitarian blocked her account forever. He’d realised that saving the world one person at a time would be every bit as tiring as it sounds.