Coyote Cartography

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My mom died just over two years ago. She and my dad were together for most of their lives; they married young, right out of uni, and stayed together until she died.

Since then, my dad’s tried to get back in the dating game. He fell prety to a romance scammer, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort over the last year trying to teach him how to spot romance scam accounts.

About the same time, Quora, a site I am on frequently, became buried in an absolute tsunami of romance scammers. A combination of lax moderation, poor site design, and weak defenses against spam makes Quora pretty much Ground Zero on the Internet for romance scammers; you’ll find more of them on Quora than you will even on dating sites.

This is fairly typical of a romance scammer account on Quora. There are tens of thousands of these accounts; this particular one is using a stolen photo of porn performer Violet Starr. Romance scammers often use stolen photos of celebrities, porn stars, OnlyFans models, and Instagram models in their fake profiles.

I spend about half an hour to an hour a day reporting romance scam accounts on Quora, typically between 150 and 200 a day. On a light day, I’ll only report 100 or so; on heavy days, I’ve reported 300 scam accounts in a single day.

I know it’s a bit like holding back the tide with a broom, but Quora’s been good to me; I’ve met many friends and even a lover and co-author on Quora, so I try to do what I can to make it a better place than I found it.

I am planning to wrote an essay about how to spot romance scammers.

This is not that essay.

Instead, I want to share an observation I’ve made. I think romance scam accounts are painfully obvious, and easy to spot; they all basically have the same shape, the same feel. You can even oftentimes spot what country the romance scammer is in by the way they mangle English, because nearly all romance scammers do not speak English as a first language.

For example, “Hello dear” and “Kindly let’s” are tipoffs to scammers in India. In fact, Indian scammers loooove the word “kindly” and use it everywhere. Forgetting to use first person pronouns is something you usually only see in Nigerian scammers who speak Yoruba as a native language. “I need urgently” often means Myanmar. Leaving out indefinite articles is typical of scammers who speak Russian natively.

Specific phrases also give scammers away. “Do the needful:” unique to India. “Angry against” instead of “angry at:” Myanmar. “Please quickly:” India again. Using “at” in place of “have:” Nigeria.

Nigerian scammers confuse A and E in English words, so will say “massage me” instead of “message me.” “Looking for serious relation” instead of "looking for a serious relationship" pops up over and over in scammer profiles.

Some folks claim the poor English is deliberate, to put off people who are smart enough to catch the scam and therefore represent a waste of effort. I think that’s true in phishing emails but I don’t think it's true of romance scammers; I think romance scammers are genuinely doing the best they can with limited English.

Yet despite how obvious they are, people still fall for them.

Not only that, there are men I call “concentrators,” men who seem uniquely susceptible to romance scammers. You'll see a guy who follows 800 other profiles on social media, and 780 of them are clearly romance scammers. Everyone they interact with, every post they comment on, is clearly a cromance scammer.

I call these people “concentrators,” because their social media connection map concentrates romance scammers extremely efficiently.

I’ve spent a lot, I mean a lot, of time over the past year thinking about that. Why are romance scammers so effective when they're so obvious? What causes a concentrator to follow hundreds of romance scam accounts? Clearly, despite how obvious they are, their pitch is precisely tuned to a specific type of psychology. What is it?

I've now looked at thousands of romance scam accounts, and I recently had an insight:

Romance scammers don’t behave like women. They behave like thirsty, desperate, sexually frustrated men.

This is, I believe, absolutely key to their success. It’s the realization that makes everything else obvious.

Consider:

A genuine woman does not post photos of herself scantily clad with her private contact information and complaints about how much she needs a man. Even OnlyFans performers don’t do this.

This is the behavior of a sexually frustrated man with few social skills, someone who lacks the empathy or experience to understand why woman don’t do this. Women don’t behave this way because, of course, it’s an invitation to get flooded with rape threats, dick pics, commentary on their bodies, slut-shaming, and religious diatribes.

I mean, even women who don’t behave this way get slammed with this sort of garbage. My wife has shared with me some of the comments and DMs she gets from horny men, and brother, let me just say, there’s a reason a lot of men struggle for female companionship.[1]

Romance scammers behave the way incel men wish that women would behave.

That’s the secret. 

There is, I think, a certain kind of man who struggles to get outside his own head, who has difficulty understanding the perspectives or experiences of others, who re-creates the entire world in his own image.[2]

That’s the target of romance scammers, who have learned through trial and error that the way to target such men is to hold up a mirror in front of them, dressed in the drag of an OnlyFans performer.

We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. Lonely men respond to reflections of their own loneliness.

[1] You’re in her DMs. I’m getting screenshots of her DMs with messages like “check out this loser, have you ever seen anyone with such terrible social skills?” We are not the same.

[2] There are woman who do this as well, of course, but I think that female romance scam victims aren’t among them, there’s something else going on.

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I’d never been to Wales before.

The circumstances around the trip sucked. My metamour (my girlfriend’s girlfriend) received a catastrophic medical diagnosis (cancer), so she and my girlfriend decided on short notice to get married. In Wales, where they live, naturally.

The extended polycule did an absolutely bang-up job of pulling the whole thing together on frightfully short notice. My Talespinner and I ended up in an AirBnB in Llanddarog with Eunice, her fiancé, and her girlfriend.

Wales is...um. Wales is very.

Getting there was a whole ordeal, filled with airline snafus and almost-missed connections and ticketing problems...more on that later, perhaps. Once we arrived in London, things took a turn for the weird.

So there we were, a bevy of Americans and Londoners in a rented minibus on the way to Wales. What can go wrong, you ask? Well, now, let me tell you.

Wales is a place where their understanding of “roads” is more or less hypothetical. In Wales, you’ll often find yourself on a one-lane dirt track with trees on both sides, and you’ll like it, because that’s all you get.

Driving in Wales is bonkers. Driving in Wales at night in the rain is utterly absurd, a bizarre mix of high comedy and desperate panic.

Once we arrived, though...

Once we arrived, Wales turned out to be cold, wet, cold, foggy, cold, and almost indescribably beautiful.

That photo up top? It's the view out the wondow in the room I shared with my Talespinner in Paxton View Barn, a converted barn at Bryngwendraeth Farm.

That tiny tower waaaaay off in the distance in the left is Paxton Tower, a Victorian folly erected in honor of Lord Nelson, or so the story goes (I find it much more likely that the dude who bilt it didn’t much give a toss about Admiral Nelson and just liked the view).

Everything about Wales is breathtakingly gorgeous, even if it is brutally, bitterly cold. That's the thing aqbout Europe, they just leave history and natural scenic beauty lying around on the side of the road, instead of packing it up and selling it the way we do here in the Colonies.

I mean, just look at this! Even the town streets are ridiculously scenic. Treacherous to drive, yes, but scenic.

After the wedding, we found a lovely old church.

Our last day, we’d planned to visit Paxton’s Tower, because, hey, you can't visit a foreign country with a faux-castle nearby and not go.

A ferocious squall swept in on our last night, bringing rain and such fog as can scarcely be imagined by human intellect...

...but we made the trek anyway.

There’s remarkably little to see there—it is literally only a model—but from the foot of the tower, the landscape is breathtaking. You can see the Emyn Muil across the Dead Marshes almost to the great gates of Mordor themselves!

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