A sucker baby boom

Rewind to last summer...

I was in the process of finishing up my bachelor's degree so I decided to take a 1 week class in traverse city (a 5 hour drive up from where I live) to satisfy a program requirement. Anyways, when I got there I met this older dude. He was in the class with me trying to satisfy the same class requirement so he could graduate the same time as myself. There wasn't really anything extraordinary about the guy except for the fact that dude was knocking on 50's door and was single. But if you see the dude in action, all wonderment of how that occurred goes out the window. Dudes "game" is like that of Jerome's (c) Martin but without the charm. So basically, all aggression and corniness.

After half the week had gone by I had gotten pretty cool with old dude and he decided to tell me about this online "relationship" (for lack of a better word) he had been having for the past month or so. Dude was like "yeah I've been messing with this African babe over the internet...yadda yadda" "She's bad as hell...blah blah blah" and then he asks me if I wanted to see pics. So I'm like yeah why not. So dude busts out his laptop and brings up the pics and I'm like...yoooooo...that chick is no African.

Dude had pulled up pics of an internet model a cousin of mine used to obsess over named Absolutely Amber. I'm talking cuz used to buy website memberships and the whole nine...One day me and cuz had attended a block party in Detroit and found out that she was a native Detroiter.

So I tell ol boy the deal and you can tell he was mad disappointed. Apparently, somebody was using the pic to try to scam money out of the guy. Fucked up right? Anywho, dude wised up.

Now what made me tell this story was that just yesterday I was watching MSNBC and Chris Hanson (of To Catch a Predator fame) had a show entitled "To Catch an I.D. Theft". And in it Chris was trying to find the center of these scams, but this was damn near impossible seeing as though once a credit card number hit the web purchases almost instantly began occurring all over the globe. So Hanson decided to set up a website store himself with the premise that you can use stolen cards there without them checking. And pretty much instantly people started buying from the site. He then saw that some of the the delivery locations were right here in the U.S.. So using a fake delivery company he delivered the packages himself and found out that older single folks are getting scammed.

Basically, the scammers send out spam letters out playing on the sympathy of the reader. After the reader bites they show them fake pics of themselves trying to set off some fake ass love connection. What follows that is that the victims are conned out of giving money and also fowarding packages to Africa, Australia, and other places. The scammers were getting over making millions of dollars. Anywho... so Chris informed some of the folks that they were getting scammed and they let him use their accounts to follow the packages. What he found was that there is a network of internet scams coming out of Nigeria. And that is just one of the cons that they run out of the country...

Small world right?

Anyways...so be careful folks. Make folks aware if you hear any shit like this going down in your area.