How I Found a Genuine Connection with an Online Scammer (and Almost Took Her Money)

Online scammers are a persistent breed of hustlers you meet through really any social media account. I’ve had my fair share of encounters with the classic unencrypted email begging for money in capitalisation and spelling that looks like an auto-generated Google password, the odd Instagram account promising sexy meetups with four installment payments via Cash App of $50, the Twitter reply promising a sugar daddy who wants to spoil you in exchange for your mailing address and bank routing numbers… And they’re generally easy to spot. The profile picture is usually scraped from an Eastern European Blackberry phone and they speak in a cadence of broken English complemented by Apple’s catalog of “sexual emojis.”

I don’t mind the extra attention from them on my other social media sites — after all, it’s a relatively minor annoyance that just translates to more engagement for my own account. But these online scammers are getting more advanced. Recently, I had one reach out to me through Fiverr, a freelance writing site where I make extra money writing dating app bios, and I met a strange, kind woman named Natalia who showed me another side of the money grubbers that are so desperate for my debit card.

Natalia first reached out to me through my dating app bio writing service. I initially thought that she seemed a little bit strange, but I was in the business of writing Tinder bios to help people find love, not to pass judgement on those who had already paid the $5 service fee.

I continued how I normally would with someone I was trying to sell to, directing them to my past work, asking about how badly they wanted the bio (I hadn’t yet met someone who was only half committed to purchasing a bespoke Tinder bio. You have to be in a desperately dry spell to search for a matchmaker online and click on the twenty year old freelancer). And then Natalia threw me a curveball, redefining our relationship as buyer and seller

I would have to change my selling strategy. Questions needed to be answered now: why did she think that Fiverr was a dating app? It’s about as sexual as a WeWork dormitory. Most of the people on the app are devoting a large chunk of their time to outsourcing their copywriting skills. Sex isn’t occupying much of their schedule. And if she wasn’t on this app to buy anything, and to in fact find people to date, why was she messaging me?

Ah. That’s why.

Natalia was taking a very direct approach to try to get my personal information in order to either hack my phone or triangulate my location to give to the nearest human traffickers for hire. While it was nice to hear that she thought I was handsome, I didn’t know if she had the best intentions in mind for me.

And the prize pool grows. I wasn’t aware that a mansion was on the table at the beginning! I was listening, if a little bit hesitant to give up my writing for her immediately.

Maybe it’s because I’m young and naive, but I’m really not ready to become a house husband, no matter how eager she was to provide.

Given that this was clearly an online scammer, I was very surprised that someone had taken the time to code a data-mining bot as sophisticated as this. She was really persistent in trying to get me to move into this so-called mansion to love her good. She knew exactly when to pull out the “I have eyes for only you” line, and she was willing to compromise on allowing me to continue to write, even if that would mean time apart from each other.

But I would have to throw her a curveball, just to test the limits of her circuitry.

Had I done it? Had I crafted a solid enough excuse to get her to give up on selling this dream of a summertime mansion romance. Suddenly our whirlwind vacation of sex, writing breaks, and more sex seemed to me more like a completely desexualized babysitting gig.

Now this is an unexpected twist on the unexpected twist I threw in. Suddenly it occurred to me that I could be talking to a real person. At least I was hoping there was because the only other explanation was that this technology had gained sentience and was learning from me, fulfilling the Terminator films’ predictions about The Singularity. Sure, while the text “even the impotent become fertile” could be ripped straight from a banner scam ad on a freaky porn site to prey on their regular, perhaps less than virile site visitors, it was a sudden moment of kindness from this total stranger I had never met before.

Now, it’s worth it to mention that I’m not impotent, just like she probably wasn’t a woman named Natalia, but the fact that she was ready to help a stranger in need made me feel better than if she had just sent me $5 for a bio in the first place.

It’s times like this that I’m reminded of how lucky I am to be living in an age of interconnectedness. Suddenly I wasn’t just playing along with a sugar mommy scam, holding onto the glimmer of hope that I might be able to close this sale. It was comforting to know that there was a real, living, breathing person on the other end of the chat trying to help me for as long as it took to get my credit card number. It was also comforting to know that I now held the power, considering that my impotence meant that she could no longer leverage sex as a reason for me to pack up my life in my two bedroom apartment and move in with this woman who’d found me online.

I told her that I didn’t want my impotence cured, it helped me focus on my writing. To which she replied:

“Whether you like it or not” definitely gave me pause about continuing the conversation. There was a chance that she would be able to track me down via my IP address if I spent many more minutes exchanging messages with her. She could already be on her way to chloroform me and have me strapped to a table for testicular surgery done out of the goodness of her heart. Thankfully, by this point she had lost interest and just wanted me to send one of my friends to be her prey in my place. What a perfect opportunity to circle back to my Tinder bio writing service!

Back where we started, but this time she knew she couldn’t seduce me with promises of one day meeting in person and making skin-to-skin contact. Sneaky little scammer she is, she had picked up on the fact that I respond the best to promises of money. So she asked me for 50 Tinder bios for all of her friends, priced at $250 for the full package, and promptly turned off her phone.

I still message her occasionally to ask if she wants those 50 bios, but it’s less about the needs of her gaggle of single, presumably Eastern European women. It’s because through her misspellings and grammatical errors, she was able to give me the hope that I could solve her loneliness and turn a profit while doing it. And though she may have been a scammer, our change meeting matched two incomplete people (herself unsexed, myself unpaid) and showed them what it might be like to be whole: her as the caretaker of her impotent love, and myself as the workhorse with a regular client and a source of steady income. If Natalia should ever find me, I’ll buy her dinner.