I got a WhatsApp message from a local phone number asking if I was a delivery guy and ‘when I was going to deliver the flowers’. The writer sounded angry and even sent me a few voice messages to vent her displeasure about ‘the late delivery’. She had an Indonesian slang and the language she used in her messages reflected it too. She even tried to call me but I was teaching at that time and did not answer her call. When I was free, I tried to video call her because I thought, one look at my face and she would realise that she had the wrong person.
Then, she messaged me saying she had made a mistake with the phone number and politely apologised. She sounded friendly and I responded in kind, giving her the benefit of the doubt. She even voice-called me on WA to apologise. She said she was in Medan, Sumatra and I took the oppotunity to test her Hokkien. Surprisingly, she could speak a little!
Then, she sent me a photo of herself which I did not ask for and asked if she was pretty. I tried to change the subject when I noticed her profile photo had a nice Middle Eastern style of architecture and asked her about it. By now, we were already in our second day of messaging.
I also noticed that she got a few things wrong. When I sent her photos of my trip to Turkey, she replied that she had never been outside Indonesia! By now, she also asked me to message her on her Indonesian number. I looked up both numbers on SemakMule and it said that the Indonesian number had been searched twice.
Another red flag came up an hour later. Without being asked, she started to talk about her ex and how he was killed while driving. She was on a video call with him which caused him to die in an accident. And that is why, she said, she would never be able to video call anyone. “How convenient!” I thought to myself. If she had video-called me, I would have screen-captured her face for you guys to see.
Now that I was sure she was a scammer, I kept her talking, waiting for the moment she would spring her ‘by the way, have you ever invested in forex/bitcoin/<insert dodgy investment scheme here>?’ It usually comes by the third conversation but hers never came. Instead, I was treated to more photos. One photo was of her dad going to see their land that morning. I looked closely at it and saw a Malaysian road-tax sticker on it! How can that be so if they were in Medan?
Strangely, she did not once bring up that subject. Ah, that is okay because scammers now play the long game, using love scams to trick their victims into parting with their money thinking they were building a future together. So I tried to hurry the process by telling her that I was about to make a big investment by buying land in Thailand and building a house there. I hoped she would quickly change tactics and ask me to invest in her instead.
During CNY, I did not reply her and she sent me angry messages. Huh? If she has Chinese relatives like she claims, she should know it was CNY! I shot back by saying I was busy negotiating for the land in Thailand and hoped that she would bring up her investment scheme but instead, she sent that laughing gif in the last screenshot I shared.
My thoughts
I think ‘she’ is not one person but a group of scammers. A girl makes the initial call to hook the victim and then, the whole conversation is taken over by other scammers – most probably men who have a better idea of how guys think. That is most probably why ‘she’ forgot some of her back story.
Pepper's World. Notes to myself. 