Incoming scam - play along or block them?
Discussion
A few days ago a French woman connected with me on LinkedIn. In her profile it says that she works at the same company as me. Nothing odd there as it's an Anglo-French company and there's lots of contact between the English and French employees.
Then she messaged me in French, just to say hi. Again, nothing too odd about that - new connections do sometimes drop you a courtesy message.
I can't speak French so I put the message into Google Translate and then typed a polite reply in English, translated that to French and sent it.
She seemed to be taking a bit of interest in me so we had a few more exchanges which seemed fine as they were work related - new employee getting to know some of her colleagues perhaps. Reasonable.
But then she became more and more keen that we connect outside LinkedIn, asking if I wanted to use Whatsapp or Google Hangouts instead, which seemed a little odd. Then, I woke up this morning to find a message asking me to send her photos of myself!
At this point I did some digging. Notably, her profile name on LinkedIn is different to the name in her email address on the contacts section of her LinkedIn profile, which seems strange. Even more suspiciously, when I save her profile pic from LinkedIn and do a reverse Google image search I find the Instagram profile of someone with the same pic but a different name altogether.
I reckon she's going to try a scam I've heard of where a man is encouraged into having increasingly intimate exchanges which will culminate in her having enough material to hold me to ransom. Basically, "give me a load of money or this screen capture I did from our sexy Skype call will be shared with all your contacts".
Oh, and I suspect "she" is actually a "he", probably sat behind a computer in Nigeria or somewhere.
Do I just block them or are there some fun ways to string them along a bit first?
Then she messaged me in French, just to say hi. Again, nothing too odd about that - new connections do sometimes drop you a courtesy message.
I can't speak French so I put the message into Google Translate and then typed a polite reply in English, translated that to French and sent it.
She seemed to be taking a bit of interest in me so we had a few more exchanges which seemed fine as they were work related - new employee getting to know some of her colleagues perhaps. Reasonable.
But then she became more and more keen that we connect outside LinkedIn, asking if I wanted to use Whatsapp or Google Hangouts instead, which seemed a little odd. Then, I woke up this morning to find a message asking me to send her photos of myself!
At this point I did some digging. Notably, her profile name on LinkedIn is different to the name in her email address on the contacts section of her LinkedIn profile, which seems strange. Even more suspiciously, when I save her profile pic from LinkedIn and do a reverse Google image search I find the Instagram profile of someone with the same pic but a different name altogether.
I reckon she's going to try a scam I've heard of where a man is encouraged into having increasingly intimate exchanges which will culminate in her having enough material to hold me to ransom. Basically, "give me a load of money or this screen capture I did from our sexy Skype call will be shared with all your contacts".
Oh, and I suspect "she" is actually a "he", probably sat behind a computer in Nigeria or somewhere.
Do I just block them or are there some fun ways to string them along a bit first?
MitchT said:
I reckon she's going to try a scam I've heard of where a man is encouraged into having increasingly intimate exchanges which will culminate in her having enough material to hold me to ransom. Basically, "give me a load of money or this screen capture I did from our sexy Skype call will be shared with all your contacts".
Oh, and I suspect "she" is actually a "he", probably sat behind a computer in Nigeria or somewhere.
That is exactly what this is.Oh, and I suspect "she" is actually a "he", probably sat behind a computer in Nigeria or somewhere.
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