ive actually encountered these scams myself, back in the myspace days this chick I randomly hit up... she kept having a story as to why she was traveling around, she got in a rush saying she loved me after a week of randomly msgn off and on. then she asked me if I had a bank account
then I got her to call me, and she had a funny british sounding accent, might not have even been a girl
that's the first time I learned how to trace ip addresses, I talked her into sending me a email, and I tracked it down to an exact address in Africa. I googled the address and it came up as a notorious web café for scams (news articles and erythang)
this shyt is extremely common, and people fall for that shyt frequently
the reason she asked me if I had a bank account is because she was going to send me a fake cashier check, have me cash it at my bank, and then send her the cash. then ill be the one held responsible for it
Yeah that's the original cracking cards shyt that black Americans started doing.
Everybody had gotten one of them emails claiming you won the lotto or some other bullshyt. They're all over job sites too, many times I applied to jobs I thought were legit then when I got into it with them i noticed several red flags,did my due diligence and realized it was a scam.
I guess I got hip to online scams from back when I was like 13, and brehs were selling hot nextels, sidekicks and Jordan's on the internet, and I learned how the scams works cause they ask for money transfers through Western Union (nearly untraceable nor is there any protection from fraudulent activity).
Over the past few years they've gotten far more sophisticated though. When I was looking for a job I basically got a reply from what seemed like HR at UBS (a major investment bank in the UK). They had a legit email (which I later came to realize was hacked), went as far to do a "1st round of interviews" via Skype.
But I was always skeptical as to why did they want me so bad, they wanted to fly me out to Europe the whole 9. Real shyt I don't have the qualifications to warrant them trying to recruit me so hard. The pay structure was sounding too good to be true etc. but it was like a 2 hour interview asking me all types of normal interview questions. I did my math and did a jump of reason that it was bullshyt.
So I started trolling by just curing at her interviewer, just to see what kind of reaction I would get. She ended up just saying "hey we do not condone such language, to be hired with us you cannot do that again". And that was it and the interview continued
Any reputable company would blacklist you and end the interview immediately after such an outburst.
Then they started asking for money (to process my paperwork
), and send it through Western Union to a center in Tennessee
I was pissed so I trolled some more, then she realized it was a lost cause then said "go fukk your mother"
But yeah like you said that's also a common scam. A few months ago it was on the news that some old cac got scammed out of $5MM, yes million, doing that online dating shyt. She was only able to recover like 2million but the rest they said was lost in a web of transactions from Swiss, Romanian, South African, and
Nigerian banks.