Has anyone had a romance scammer start messaging them on Quora? How do you know if the person is scamming you? What do you do?

The names the scam uses for its profiles seem more and more to be generated from some kind of name automation, again a relatively low to no effort robot doing this. Many sites, and I believe Quora is among them, have very little defenses built in against a profile generating robot; yet again the scammers have a low to no effort way in.

To elaborate a bit: I suspect amost everyone has these pop up as direct messages and comments on their answers. The bots used to do this spread a very wide net. It starts with stealing the public picture of a onlyfans model, porn actor or just a hot girl on facebook; this is trivially easy. The profile picture is in all these cases public and must most often be if the original owner is to attract some customers or followers. The pictures are thus available to scrape up by a rough kind of search robot. The same for males, only pictures with a somewhat military look and rich buisiness looks is preferred.

Yet a scary part? I am very sure todays languange learning models are well tailored to automating this last correspondence as well. And then that also becomes low effort and will further enrich the totally despicable criminals setting the whole shebang up. Enrich to the point they will have a marked influence on the societies they parasitise.

Taylor Swift Won Her Biggest Battle - The Ringer

The predatory robots didn’t come as hell-bent war machines. They came offering a faximile of the friendship and intimacy that so many craved and were themselves unable to fashion. They sought out the weakest of the human herd, sucking their souls and wallets dry. Leaving the empty husks aside when done, refuelled and strenghtened, they were able to reach even more…

So now they have a multitude of hot babe profile pictures, coupled with a multitude of profiles for little effort. Time to use a low effort mass spreading of a short sentence (DM me, You look hot, You have such interesting content here on Quora, and so on), often with a hook for further direct messaging. All very low effort, and as such can easily be spread very wide.

You will notice that it’s quite often easy for you to spot the bot. Then you’re not the intended victim. The intended victim is instead someone who is either normally easily duped, or, mostly, currently in an emotional state that makes them easily duped. Starved for attention, severly frustrated sex life, in a depression, desperate for money, deeply yearning for friendship, scared… Oh, now you’re vulnerable to the robot. You desperately want to believe it is human, and that it is what it purports to be- the contact you need. You DM.

Do people of NYC drive around Central Park all the time? Is there any subway tunnel to cross the park quickly? Is it annoying for people and does it cause traffic?

And as of now, here steps the humans and the high effort in. These humans are very good at making vulnerable people form connections with them- imagined romantic connection, friendship, financial advice, co-conspirators to the caper of the century… And then the pleas for money come. With the vetting done by having the bots be so obvious only the vulnerable rises to the bait, these cretins have a scarily high sucess rate, enough to fill many, many data centers with people whose only job is being a vampire to suck your wallet and soul dry.