So not long ago I signed up for a website called Blossoms.com. I found myself being pulled into a lot of different directions. I ended up being bombarded by women of ages 18-43 looking for love. Now most of them are nice people. A few of them are scammers. Some of them are nice people who I feel are trying to marry their way out of a bad living situation.
I want to talk a little bit about scammers. First, it can be really easy to tell if they are. The writing is on the wall so to speak. When you look at their profile. You will see 2-8 pictures of what looks like a model posing for professional-grade photograph. There may be 1 picture of a normal person as well. Another tell-tale sign of them being a scammer is obvious to most people, but essentially not all of their photographs look alike. Its kind of silly when you see it because you honestly think "What the hell is going on here?".
Now some scammers play the long game. They will talk to you in chat for hours, always flirting using lots of "hehehe"'s and emoticons. Essentially laughing and pretending everything about you is either handsome, interesting, or cool. But eventually, it works like this, they will say for one reason or another that they don't like the website that they are on. They will ask you to go to another website where you have to pay to signup. You can tell its a fake website when you that all of their members look like models.
One way to tell earlier on is if they are a scammer is to ask them about what they do for a living. They tend to give vague and brief responses. One time I asked they said "trading". Trading what exactly? Another time I asked they just said "assistant manager". Of course I followed up with, "Well then, what does your manager do?". They just said "marketing". So its actually pretty common when you ask real people that they will even tell you what company that they work. They may tell you what its like, what they hate about work, what they love about work. All the various responsibilities, etc.
Sometimes a scammer may say that they need to go to another website because it has webcams. Usually if you are on a website that you have to pay for, it will already have one. Anyway, If they do, you can ask them to use skype or yahoo messenger instead. If they refuse or say it doesn't work with their webcam, I would say call bullshit on them, mainly because skype and yahoo are mature professional products that are designed to function on the largest variety of webcams available. Moreover, I am willing to bet there are common OS level interfaces that the driver talks to. So if you have the driver installed correctly it should pretty much work regardless of the what the webcam is because when software from a website or skype ask the OS to do something, the OS will call the driver's implementation of that task on the webcam hardware.
They may say that their English isn't very good and thus its necessary to go to this website that does translation services. If you were naive enough to sign up, you would find that they probably use a checkout system that you have never heard of. You buy credits for translations. In some cases its as bad as 1 dollar per chat message, but they try to disguise it in a credit/point based system, offering discounts on larger volumes of points at 'discounts'.
Anyway as it turns out Blossoms.com already has built-in translation services for paying members. If you already signed up, all you have to do is type in your native language and it will translate for you. The website already has several anti scammer features. It will say which country their IP address is coming from. It will has a link to an image database search where you can put other peoples pictures into and this would allow you to search the internet for their pictures. I would still recommend google images instead. Their database said it only searched like 5.4 billion pictures. I think that is a little low. Its not strange for photographers to take over 70 photos a day for example. So a real internet image database should be many many times the human population of the earth.
Anyway that is all for now. Perhaps in the future I can get to talk about what the non-scammers are like.
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