I´m here since a few months and already had two cases of Scimming on this site.
What is scimming?
Scimming is a very perfidious method to bring people to specific actions. Mostly people are contacted by pretty Asian women. They pretend to be looking for pen pals in a normal way and then start mentioning certain topics in the course of the conversation (in most cases, at some point it's about investments in cryptocurrencies, which are, however, widespread in Asia).
The perfidious thing is that its not like in former times with just a few direct questions, they really try to win your trust and have time. A lot of time. They can write a week with you and if you are careless you overlook the signals like:
- Single and rich
- have an own business or are a manager and looking for friends
- will guarantee you to be trustworthy person
- every now and then there are little inconsistencies like a bad grammar or"standard answers" to specific topics. Its like somebody copy a question into chatGPT and copy the answer into the message to you (so try to ask questions that chatGPT probably cannot answer!)
- ask for a mail address and write from a spam mail-address (which everybody should have nowadays) and - important - watch the answer. If you have luck you can see in the mail header or header of the answered person, that the mail is from China than the country he/she told you he/she lives in
- Often they explain why they have a number with a different country code like where they are from.
- As soon the words "Cryptocurrency" and "Investment" appears in an answer its a red flag! Dont trust!
Suggestion to the admins of penpal-gate: Completely forbid WhatsApp numbers (phone numbers) in text fields on this side. When typing contact data give a warning banner for scamming or other methods people can try.
If anyone wants to share a WhatsApp number with anybody they can share it via private mail address.
My guess is, that there are much more Scammers on this site than people believe....
Its not like you think: Its not like that you get a dumpy text like "Hey, wanna have fun with me?" . Its more like somebody want to know you for beginning a penpal friendship. Those scammers are very creative and have time to win your trust.
I've been here for years and nothing similar has ever happened to me, however so does on Tinder as well as on other platforms (mostly dating apps rather than language exchange platforms).
Nevertheless, it's particularly easy to spot such scammers if you've been on the Internet for a long time. I've personally never fallen into that.
Nevertheless, thank you for warning all of us.
I noticed there are loads of teenagers here, who could easily get influenced by the aforementioned scammers.
We have several mechanisms in place to fight spam, that we have fine tuned over the years. While it's impossible to detect every single attempt, I think we're pretty good at handling these issues. If you see anything suspicious, feel free to report a specific message or a profile.
Subtle scamming, on the other hand, is very hard to detect. Gaining someone's trust is a very tedious process, so fortunately it doesn't happen very often.
Suggestion to the admins of penpal-gate: Completely forbid WhatsApp numbers (phone numbers) in text fields on this side. When typing contact data give a warning banner for scamming or other methods people can try.
If anyone wants to share a WhatsApp number with anybody they can share it via private mail address.
We already do show a warning message whenever certain patterns/keywords are detected in a message. I think it's counterproductive to try to block phone numbers: people will always find ways to get around such limits. Besides, it's fine if people become good friends and want to pursue their friendship outside Penpal-Gate. We won't force our users to keep using the platform forever! But we do take action to encourage people to be careful online.
Thanks for the warning! So far I didn't come across something like that and I feel like those "Asian women" would target mostly men but its still good to keep it in mind. Must be kinda sad if you took the effort to get to know someone for a week or longer for it them to come out as scanners...
Thanks for the warning! So far I didn't come across something like that and I feel like those "Asian women" would target mostly men but its still good to keep it in mind. Must be kinda sad if you took the effort to get to know someone for a week or longer for it them to come out as scanners...
I had some doubts a bit earlier, because I wondered about grammar in a country which is normally pretty much of native english speakers. But let them answer to an email (where you can read your writing below) is a pretty good method to find it out, because there is some text (as a header) which is automatically added by the provider where the email-adress of the scammer is registered. Thats something they cannot hide - and in my case this header had chinese letters in it (which I translated with a translator like deepl.com . This translator has an automatic language recognation. So its pretty much sure that a person from e.g. Singapore usually does not have a chinese mailprovider...
Well I have experience with such people. Not here, but on other sites. But I never send them money. They give quickly up, when you don't believe them. Especially the ones, which pretend to be a famous person like Hugh Jackman.
