It should come as no surprise by now that I enjoy a good scambait. Scambaiting, or the art of deliberately wasting scammers' time, has become a bit of a flourishing practice of late. All the better for people who love both being entertained and watching criminal activity get foiled.
Most scamming you've seen online is what's called an advance-fee scam. Scammers, hiding behind one flimsy excuse or another, will ask for a processing fee of some sort in exchange for the untold millions they're offering their victim. Its distant cousin the romance scam is less preferred, however: scammers will masquerade not as a government body or a bank, but an eligible bachelor(ette) who juuuust needs a few hundred dollars to come and see you.
They require far more investment on the part of both the scammer and the scambaiter, making them unappealing for content creation… at least to some. My most recent rabbit hole, I fear, has been the chronicles of Stacey Hernandez, a middle-aged British woman who's become an unlikely scambaiter. Hernandez lures in romance scammers and subjects them to a bizarre, meandering narrative that's then posted one day at a time.
I fear I've fallen into the habit of reading this every day like it's my favorite soap opera, and the plotlines Stacey comes up with aren't far off. If only popular TikTok musician John J Irwin weren't foiled at every turn by Stacey's ripped firefighter neighbor Fernando…
