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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • Sometimes they get tens of thousands, like if they convince the person to invest in a fraudulent investment scheme. Also, it’s not fulltime work with one person… maybe an hour or a few a day per victim, and they do several at once. Reply to one person, reply to another one while waiting to hear back, reply to another… and sometimes the people doing the ‘work’ are merely employees working for a wage or percentage! If they’re in a country with a different scale of currency like China, Brazil or Moldova, 10,000 USD would go a lot farther than in the US.

    Anyway, it’s not theoretical. Check out this Wired article for instance, or one on ProPublica. They’re basically the same as the “I’m a lonely doctor in the military in Africa” romance scams that have been going around social media for years, somewhat descendants of the famous Nigerian Prince scams.


  • It definitely sounds like a ‘pig butchering’ scam. They find someone lonely, give them a sob story, proclaim a special bond, talk to them for months, then start asking for money or pumping an investment scheme. Most likely, he would never come to your country, but rather will start saying “i need <thousands of dollars> to travel there…”


  • The video length was pretty limiting, though. Instagram at the time started doing 15 second videos. The six seconds lent itself to goofy comedy and not much more.

    It seems like they should have sold it. Or just jammed in a bunch of ads… maybe an option to remove ads with a paid membership. Simply killing it doesn’t make any money other than to avoid losing more, and they’d already invested a fair bit which you can’t recoup by just closing something. Of course, Google does that all the time I guess.