no, of course not... i've never known a woman to lie about anything..

BTW, some guy told me to call him at this phone number with the area code 234 saying he was in England. 234 IS GHANA or Nigeria I forget which. I Googled it. Just FYI.

If you are really sick and warped like me and like turning in scammers to the feds, there is a federal web site. You make up a BS email address with a BS name and a BS YM account and just keep harvesting information until they try to scam and then turn them in. People think you cannot save stuff on Mingle. If you are the anti-Christ like me, you do a page capture with PDF Creator and save an image of their profile so if they delete it, you still have it. You can get a BS phone at Walmart for $50 for people in general you don't know and give them that.

But as I said, I am am warped MF. I will play along. "I love you" "Love you too". "I want to marry you". "Okay". I mean I will play the whole thing out and I have a set of details that I use for all of them so I can keep my stories straight and I will play their MF azzes out until they ask for something. I was asked for $34,000 by the last one and he was a smooth operator. He was very convincing but I always realized his stories did not add up.

You can also be the anti-Christ like me and get www.netdetective.com for $30 for 3 years and pull up so much information on most people with very little information that you will make them pee their pants.

Of course another friend of mine on here who I will not expose likes to hook into their facebook accounts and go from them to their friends to their friends of friends to their friends of friends and so on and check them out.

If they give you a house address, you can Zillow it and then from there get the info as to who owns it.

There are several of us on this site that will play the whole thing out until you scam. I will even go so far as to invent fake love poetry and ****.

So scammers beware some of us are really twisted f*ers with too much time on our hands and not enough to do. I particularly like to bust military impersonators.

Another tell tale sign is they will SUDDENLY have to go on a business trip out of country after meeting you and want you to contact them in that other country. If you are avoiding scammers, just tell them when they get back home to the US to message your their home phone number in Detroit or whatever. They will not contract you again.

Many will ask for your email saying that "they don't have time to check this site often", etc.

Many will ask for your phone number so they can "text" you.

Also, they will have "rules" about when they are available to speak to you. Times of day and such. These are not necessarily money type scammmers but people cheating on someone.

Also, scammers and married people WILL NOT LEAVE A PHONE MESSAGE. The slick ones will not even email. They will go through YM because you can delete the entire history of every conversation you ever had with them.

Also beware, there are just some really mentally ill people on here. There is one I played along with who I called Timothy Mc Vey Jr. He would not contact anywhere outside of YM except on a pre-paid phone. He seriously lives in a bunker under a house and believes every conspiracy theory known to man. He is at least schizophrenic if not worse and unmedicated. So be very careful who you give your real name to. He have has multiple ISPs so he his hard to get an IP on.

I have said before with military guys, PUSH for their APO address. Scammers will tell you it's top secret which is BS. Every normal military guy who in REALLY interested in you and trusts you will give it to you in heart beat if you want to mail them letters and cards from home.

Also with scammers, another way to scare them off is to do what I call "nailing them to the cross". They push you for details. Give fake ones. And push them harder and harder and harder and harder for details about themselves.

Also scammers like to isolate you for mind control. They will want you to quit Mingle, not mention them to people, go off all social web sites, not talk to friends, etc. That is a huge red flag.

Yeah, scammers are definitely getting more inventive. There was a time when you could tell when they’d hijacked someone else’s pic ....My radar normally goes off when someone calls me “dear” and makes stupid declarations of love in the first msg, in addition to the grammar/spelling.

Ya, their English often sucks rocks. AND another thing you can do is quiz them about modern American pop culture. Like whose your favorite current music groups? I had this guy who was supposedly all into cool stuff tell me that he liked Tina Tunner (not Turner) and Boy II Men. I still had to play him for awhile to get to the big bust but I just said "Boy you are old school".

That's another thing. They do not post in forum and are scamming multiple people. Demand they call you by your first name or the the first name that you claim is yours. The big time scammers will ignore this request. You will be "Baby", "Honey", "Love", "Sweetie", "Dear", "Darling", etc. because they are scamming so many they have no idea what your name is.

i love you! can i have 34,000 american dollars please? my dog needs a flea bath, and my kitty is sick.

You forgot that you are on a secret mission for the military overseas and cannot access your own money so you need me to send you some or you are on travel and lost your wallet, or you need money for a plane ticket to come see me, and you didn't even call me sweetie or dear.

In the old times they used to be very good looking women, with bad English, with messages that had nothing to do with anything. They cost me in total in the range of about $17,000.

Now in the newer trend, the email scammers are short-sentenced, as to not reveal any shortcomings in English. They are also getting older -- early thirties, instead of late teens. They are not as flashy looking either, although still delectable. These babes are not so agressive, so they capped at about $2,000 each that they got from me.

There are a few constants between the old and the new: Their inability to converse that needs any comprehension skills, which may be the result of scamming operational front-liners not recognizing an interested customer. They should report these to the supervisor, to pass these customers to the English compartment. Another constant is the immediate need to take the correspondence out of the site, to Yahoo. I don't know why that is so. Maybe they have a better way of hiding their audit trail on the Internet (like IP addresses.)

In fact I ditched an interesting sounding new friend, because she asked me to go off site in her second letter to me. She had also other problems, like she moved about too much (which is typical of any sort of criminal person), even across state lines and countries and continents. That bothered me too. And when I nixed her, she wrote three very long email notes to me (the last two I did not open) which was all of a sudden possible, on this site. The first of these long emails was abusive and quite cross. She defended herself, very agressively.

In other words, I think she was genuine, inasmuch as she was not somebody else she pretended to be, she was honest. On the other hand, she smelled like trouble, big time. So it's just as well.

I'll keep her identity covered, it's nobody else's business who she was. I don't think she was lying, or scamming in a manner of pretense, but I still think she was dangerous, because of her moving about too much, and because of her wanting to go offsite almost right away. And because she had like five pictures up, but four of the five had no resemblance to the others. I was afraid she posted pics of a very wide age range of hers.

And lastly, because she was not pretty. In fact, I liked her for her mind. But I said, if she is that iffy, that defensive, that suspect, then her mind may be beautiful, but with her looks, the whole thing is not worth the effort.

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As far as forum scammers, I don't know what people mean. I think a scammer wants something from you (money or imnmigration status or her x-s head delivered on a platter to her) and forums are not the venue for that.

Well... european (uke, pole, hung, cheque, ***, vlad, etc.) teen-agers are more likely to know who the beatles were, and how many Kennedys died by assassination, than their North American counterparts.

And Nigerian scammers are more knowledgable about Idi Amin, Patrice Lumumba and that guy from south Africa who won the Nobel Prize.

You can tell an old Hungarian joke from the time of the war on the Sinai to an African, and she or he will laugh.

If they call me 'dear' or 'pretty' and use phrases like 'how are you over there' and 'I'm new to this site', etc. I'm a retired English teacher, so I can spot the scammer rhetoric and poor grammar right away.

Having read the thread, I think LexFointaine and MsSilverFox do not get that many scammers that want money. A money scammer would more likely be inclined to target ugly old men past middle age with a potbelly who need mulitple nightly potty trips.

As such, I think their received emails are 97% genuine. I mean, if the scammer from the Niger or Nigeria are both males who are trying to support their loving family in this legitimate job, then why would they write to lex more often than to me?

I strongly insist that scammers do not take looks into consideration.

So Lex's and Fox's tidal wave of letters are due to them because these letters are mainly genuine.

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In fact, Ms Fox and Lex are of the calibre in good looks, who can can afford to say of people approaching them, this: "Ewww... he (or she) just wants sex from me. What a disgusting scammer."

In my definition, scammers look for non-dating related stuff. After all, this is a dating site, no? There are three types of dating: serious, sincere, and serious and sincere both together. Lex and Fox mistake type one (serious only) for scammers.

No. I am sorry. I am not a scammer. I resent the insinuation.

Sue, I agree with you wholeheartedly.

If they called me "pretty" or "handsome", I would sue them for criminal misappropriation of their aesthetic senses. Or call the medical alertness team in her locality on her for her compulsive lying, and say that the girl is near psychotic now, keep her under observation.

... this was a joke. A hyperbole. A diabolic hyperbolic one. From a diabetic diabole. (Non-alcoholic, but lots of cholesterol.) And here's another one: "how are you over there" is technically correct, since they are in Ghana, and us, in America. Hm. I'd be more worried for their English teacher keeping his job if they wrote, "gorgeous, how are you over here".

Since you were an English teacher, how come you can't spell the word "grammer" correctly?

She did you didn't

You might have a point there. Very few of them start out asking for money. (It happens every now and then, but only rarely.)

But I do know that a lot of scammers like to collect e-mail addresses, and they know yours is valid if they can get you to write to them from it. Valid e-mail addresses, when collected in large quantities, are very useful to other scammers, and therefore salable.



I can't answer that, but even the ones who are NOT obvious scammers are pretty pointless -- the e-mails that consist of nothing but "Hi" or "Hello" or "How are you?" Maybe those are legitimate messages, but they sure are boring and vapid.



Well, I hope not, because it would mean that even the legitimate people have the vocabulary of a grapefruit.



I just automatically assume that about everybody now.

My dear prolific poster, grammAr IS correct! ;-)

"I waas been going throuh profiles and seed yours. I believe you mist be the one I trust in luking for true love. You been being the wuman I think been luking to be in relatship with me my dear because I now know I be been in love with me"

There's a lot of good information in this thread. In fact, I think my newest e-mailer sounds a lot like some of these people. "Dear" and trying to get me off site in his second letter. Thanks, folks.

Really, unless by some unbelievable coincidence you happen to be a second grade English teacher, there's no future with that one.