Scams and How to Avoid Them

I toy with scammers online when I’m bored. I like to break them down and get them to admit who they really are. Here are my tips to identify scammers.

Get used to linguistic analysis. Broken English will always rear it’s head at some point. Look for non-English idioms - “meet is fate” is a good one - that’s an African expression.

Reverse image search any photo you get. A lot of scammers are lazy and just use pics of Russian Instagram models without cropping or modifying them. Yandex is a good search engine for this.

Stay off of Snapchat. 80% of the people on there are Nigerian scammers, usually advertising OnlyFans pages. I’ve gotten the exact same pics from 8 or 9 “women” over the past two months there.

Reverse search e-mails and phone numbers. If nothing pops up, that’s a red flag.

This is pretty obvious, but stay away from gift cards. They’ll tell you they only want to see the last four numbers of the card so they can verify that they’re real. You’ll lose your balance.

Use a burner phone if you need to communicate with someone you don’t know. I can’t stress that enough. Pay cash if you want to use the phone for … ahem, other means.

When someone online tells you that they are a “diversified entrepreneur”, you’re talking to scammer. I’ve heard that exact phrase hundreds of times. Another popular one is head of a cosmetics company.

Be safe and have fun!