This is getting SO good! I just keep hearing from this guy on YouTube ("Dr. Christopher Johnson") who is trying to romance-scam me. I thought I'd recap the entire conversation so far! I am not kidding, I am copying and pasting this verbatim.
FROM: @dr.christopherjohnson34
TO: @ferociousgumby
Hello, I hope you're safe over there? I hope this year brings happiness, prosperity, love
, and peace all over the world . I would love us to be good friends in honesty and in trust so as time goes on it will bring something great for us in the future, hope you don't mind? I'm Doctor Christopher Johnson from San Francisco, California, where are you from if I may ask?@dr.christopherjohnson34 I'm from No Man's Land, Alaska. Wish you were here!
@ferociousgumby Hello dear, it’s my pleasure to meet you here, and am very happy
How’s Alaska? I so much love Alaska because it’s such a beautiful state@dr.christopherjohnson34 Actually, no, I lied. I live in Siberia. When you come to see me, bring your winter coat!
@ferociousgumby Hello dear
@ferociousgumby Are you still here
@ferociousgumby You just stopped talking to me
@ferociousgumby I would really love to know more about you but the nature of my job does not give me much time to come here to chat so I will appreciate it if we can chat somewhere more private and convenient so we can get to know each other better, hope you don't mind?
@dr.christopherjohnson34 I'll think about it, but I work on an oil rig and the thing exploded and they want me to pay for it. Could you please send me $400,000.00?
It was most gratifying to see this lady's video on this guy. Obviously, he has been around for a while and must have caught some fish. It isn't that hard to do.
For a while, until I got too disgusted to continue, I followed a channel called Catfished which dealt with romance scams. But the "victims", all ready to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars, were not even the clueless old people you'd think. No, they were people who wanted to dwell in the land of Make Believe. Even after the team completely debunked the scammer and traced all the messaging to Nigeria,
There is an actual Dr. Christopher Johnson (though the name is generic enough to apply to lots of people) - quite a famous one, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills who caters to the stars and goes on Entertainment tonight, etc. So the scammer might have fished up a name that is vaguely familiar to people. From the photo on his channel home page, he has stolen an image of a middle-aged white guy posing with a little boy (they ALWAYS have one child, usually a son).
In answering this guy, and I strung him along for quite a while, I used reverse tactics and said I worked on an oil rig, had an accident and the company was making me pay for it - SO, could he please send me thousands of dollars in gift cards? Finally, he stopped pestering me and went on to his next victim.
He has several "dummy" channels with nothing on them, but the pictures are similar, stolen from somewhere. Meantime when I look at the stories of the "victims", their naivete is jaw-dropping.
Some think they are being romanced by Johnny Depp or even Elon Musk, who has been cut out of his divorce settlement and needs grocery money. They accept and fork over half a million. And so on. I think these exchanges are great fun, but also kind of sad that these leeches continue to thrive on the stupidity of others. As P. T. Barnum put it: "There's one born every minute."
