Tuesday, 24 January 2012

In-tree-ging

An unexpected letter appears in my inbox from a Russian woman wanting to get to know me.
At first it looked like all the other scam dating emails I get, and, as usual, I set out to see what I could learn.

It had a bunch of the usual red-flags - a very attractive woman is interested in me, she thinks I'm nice and wants to get to know me. She mentions my profile on a dating site (remember back then?) as how she knows me - but those sites don't normally let you email people privately so that's a bit odd. Does not say anything about what it was about the profile that interested her and the email handle did not match the name.

OTOH: googling the text of the email got zero hits ... scams usually produce millions.

There were photos with it so hey: I can use google photo search to see if the photos appeared anywhere else and sure enough one of the did. It appeared on a Russian dating site - but it looked a lot less scammy than I was expecting so I used g+ contacts to help figure out the site.

Seems the handle is a reasonable pseudonym for a woman online and the site is a genuine social media site ... looks like a kind of facebook for the romantically inclined. The posts on her public page were all poetry, but that is not so unusual either and a lady has to be cautious.

On the strength of this I wrote back asking for information, and got a reply - a bit slower than I'm used to - which managed to confirm what I'd already figured out. She also sounded a bit freaked out that I found her other profile ... I still don't know any more about her or what she finds so interesting about me though. I was half expecting this to turn out to be the dating site trying to lure me back, so I was surprised, but heartened, that her reply was not an immediate solicitation, "come and sign in to a premium account to talk some more..." sort of thing. That would have been depressing. Look what these scams are doing to the dating scheme!

I actually quite like Russian women. I've replied to the reply and provided links to my other profiles ... we'll see what we can see.

The trouble with this sort of contact is that the positive possibilities are strongly limited by distance while the negative ones are not.

So, Natalya, if you read this,  .............. um?
Call me?

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