Hi everybody. I would like to introduce you to “Eileen”, a lovely lady who contacted me privately last week to talk about plants, and probably cryptocurrency too. Rather than deleting the obvious scamming messages and immediately blocking her like I typically do, I decided that I was in the mood to play along for awhile. Here is how that went.

This is “Eileen Allen”. She says she’s from Singapore and now lives in Denver, Colorado, operating a wine import and export business. I say she’s not real, that she’s AI generated, because she looks just like every other “Singaporean/other Asian woman with two English first names” who contacts me to become friends and asks obvious opening questions about plants that could be answered by simply reading what I wrote in the first place. Do not worry, I didn’t believe that she was real and I was playing along to waste her time, or quite possibly “its” time, since these days it could easily start out being a chat bot.

These scam messages typically begin with a very general inquiry about a recent post, such as this one which I made a few weeks ago on a flowering Adenium obesum in my house. I am not friends with this entity and for it to message me out of the blue with a very general opening question is a red flag. Rather than being a specific question about Adenium obesum or related species in some specific way, it’s an inquiry designed to initiate contact and generally open engagement. This behavior is especially suspicious from an account only a few months old with 19 friends. At this point in Facebook history, no one has only 19 friends on an account 4 months old and then also messages strangers. If you do, you are more or less by default a fake. I get one of these general opener queries every couple of weeks. Usually I don’t bother to respond and immediately hit the block button. I have blocked literally hundreds of accounts just like this one in the past few years. But last week I was in the mood to string the chat bot along. I wanted to see where it would go.

I decided to answer the question with a clearly insane falsehood to see what would happen. As suspected, nothing. She ignored me and indulged me with small talk. She simply stated she believed that I had a lot of experience growing them and then that topic was closed. No further follow up questions necessary because Eileen isn’t a gardener and doesn’t give a crap about my plant. (Besides, I just said that Adeniums were from Greenland and liked icy conditions, so a cold Colorado winter won’t be a problem in your “small garden”!)

By the way Eileen you asked me where I lived twice. This was answered twice and had you done even the most rudimentary bit of research into my profile, you could easily have found that I live in Arizona AND that I am blatantly lying to your face. Just a hint, honey.

A comment made after I posted this on Facebook made a good point that I had not thought of, which was that if “Eileen” were truly a plant lover from Singapore, that she would already know Adenium obesum because they are widely planted in street landscapes, public and private gardens, or kept as potted plants. “There is no way she wouldn’t know about them if she were really a plant lover from Singapore,” said the commenter, who happened to be from there as well. Accurate point! Indeed, while Adenium obesum and the various hybrids with other species are not native to wet tropical areas (they are dry tropical African and Arabian Peninsular plants mostly, with a couple of species from the deserts of southern Africa) they are widely grown in wet tropical climates such as Singapore, Thailand, and Brazil now.

The lying continues on both fronts of this distorted conversation. I said that I have never been to Denver when I grew up 30 miles away from there, and my profile says that I grew up in Boulder. And she’s lying about everything else.

I decided that it was time to pivot to relationship matters because that’s where eventually this pig-butchering scam is headed anyway, so let’s not waste time on geography anymore. I made a hard right turn into wanting to meet beautiful girls. Two sentences in, we are already discussing meeting and becoming “real friends”. Three sentences in I sent a wordless emoji sentence involving diamonds (couldn’t find a suitable wedding ring emoji), the quick passage of time, and a reference to pregnancy. I am such a stud, and I definitely want to knock Eileen up ASAP.

Alas, Eileen did not understand this emoji sentence, so I had to explain it to her. This is because she’s a chat bot and AI cannot yet accurately interpret symbols the way humans can, so she had to say she didn’t understand. Either that, or she’s an indentured captive in a scam farm in Myanmar or Laos staffed by kidnapped Chinese men and women pretending to be someone else in a fake profile and forced to scam for a living, using a translation app. Maybe a combo of both.

In any case Eileen is not who she claims to be. Any real woman would be utterly grossed out by my massively inappropriate behavior and terminate the conversation right here, but Eileen senses that she’s got a phish on the hook and decides to proceed. I decide to steer directly into pickup artist territory and start referencing the numbers 69 and 420.

I’m trying to fill out my Scammer Bingo Card as fast as possible here. Making up my alternate-ego lifestyle was highly amusing to me along the way. I also was trying to make the bot/scammer have to look up Colorado ski areas in order to waste some more of their time.

Did you know that walruses are most effectively hunted by highly fecund, multiply-wed sexagenarians on skis? I didn’t either.

The first mention of investments and cryptocurrency emerges. Good evening, we have been expecting you, Mister Emming. Mwahahahaha!

I am not yet done with constructing my Greenlandic fever dream world however, so I continue. I am also trying to tie this icy and profitable faux Utopia to the genuine (and awful) real trade in shark fins for the bizarre, pointless, cruel, and unsustainable global Chinese shark fin soup trade. Just in case Eileen is actually some indentured Chinese woman being forced to scam weird Americans in some illegal scam farm in Southeast Asia somewhere. I guess I was thinking that using a culturally recognizable buzzword might make me seem more relatable? More like a real prospect?

Proof that you literally cannot scare off these scammers with insanity. You can say ANYTHING and they parrot a version of it back to you without any pushback, no questioning of the logic, zero incredulity. Any normal woman would have bailed by now, but Eileen and I are having this hours-long back and forth with preposterous claims and obvious lies on my end going unchallenged. This is what makes me think I am still dealing with an AI Agent chat bot. Note how many sentences she writes start with some version of “I believe…” before continuing on to repeat back a rephrased version of what I just said. Scam language, designed to look like conversational engagement, but not offering anything of either insight or warranted skepticism given how completely weird I am being.

Oh hey! Sudden change of conversational topic, and I must enter the Superman phone booth to change from hypermasculine impregnator of women and profiteering walrus ski-hunter to hopelessly naive, clueless rube laboring on the Adenium plantation! (I am confident that this particular sentence has never been uttered or written before. You’re welcome, World, for my groundbreaking cleverness.)

I must admit that I didn’t see this request to join WhatsApp coming, but in my defense I have never chatted with a scam bot for this long before either. There was no way that I was going to take it over there so I began stalling and hesitating to see what Eileen would do. I also began to back off sharply from my initial enthusiasm. I could feel the energy draining out of the conversation on my end and I was actually getting a bit tired of the game after about 6 hours.

I did, however, ask the internet to answer this question: “Why do scammers all want to use WhatsApp?” The internet was full of credible replies to this search query. Here is an AI overview that I will copy and paste…

“Scammers often prefer WhatsApp because it’s a widely used messaging app, allowing them to reach a large pool of potential victims, and because it provides a level of anonymity by using phone numbers, making it easier to create fake identities and avoid being easily traced; this, combined with the app’s encryption feature, can give them a false sense of privacy to carry out their scams without detection.”

There are more detailed reasons than this quick-sketch summary, of course. But basically it comes down to being easier to discover phone numbers via WhatsApp (since you use those to register for an account there) and once they have a verified phone number it becomes easier to find out significantly more information that is of value to the scammers as well. It’s also international, cheap, easy for scammers to hide their own true identity within, and has fewer security features than many other platforms of this nature. It’s also easy to delete accounts and start new ones should the intended victim become suspicious and report problems. So no, I am not going to go over to WhatsApp with Eileen.

The next day, after a 20-hour pause, Eileen messaged me back to see if I had maybe reconsidered. I had not. Instead I decided to ask some questions to see if she could answer them regarding why she was “trusting” me when in fact I was acting super erratic and lying bombastically the day before. She claimed that she had been harassed and sent pornographic materials that made her feel nasty. While I am sure that this has happened to many if not most women online, and that it is sickening and possibly threatening, it also doesn’t square with her willingness to chat me up. Because after all she “feels my sincerity”. Well, glad that I was coming off as sincere despite my clear efforts to appear like an unhinged and deeply imbalanced liar with pants afire. This supposed “trust” of a weird geriatric internet walrus hunter from Nuuk with 20 kids makes no more sense than my story did. But we are Scamdancing (a neologism I just invented!) and this is part of how you play the game.

By the way, Meta/Facebook Messenger actually gave me a pop-up warning a couple of times during this discussion with “Eileen” that I should be wary of this entire conversation being a scam once WhatsApp was brought up. For all of its numerous faults and shady behavior, I do have to credit FB with giving me an alert in case I wasn’t seeing through it on my own. So they get a gold star for that. It also proves the point that the scammers pretend that WhatsApp is more secure, when in fact it’s not.

I decided to just see if this final sentence would finally be the conversation-killer, when all the other bullsh!t I spewed wasn’t. Yep. Mentioning that scammers use WhatsApp did in fact do the trick. Eileen has not written me again. Case closed. Probably….

These scam Asian women all look virtually identical. They seem AI-designed to appeal to the broadest segment of the heterosexual male population. I suspect that this is true in many cultures, not just the USA, but obviously I see mostly ones directed at an American male audience and not one elsewhere in the world. Perhaps the idealized international woman differs in India or Brazil, for example? Comment below if you have seen a preponderance of other types in other cultures that also are scammy in that context.

Another feature of these fake profiles is how filled with bland, banal platitudes they are. There is no indication that this is a real person with a real life, a circle of friends and family, a history, real emotions and thoughts including less-than-perfect moments. There is also zero sense of humor. Mostly just vaguely saccharine “positive thinking” nonsense. If you’re attempting to scam someone, of course you play it safe. Don’t want any red flags to be raised, right? Maybe the Walrus Skier could take a clue. Although clearly it didn’t matter with “Eileen” in any case.

What kind of weird language vaguely resembling English is this? I’m guessing that this is a translation of AI slop originally generated in Chinese. What is somewhat more interesting is that “Eileen” does seem to have gone to some lengths to craft a profile with a lot of botanical content, much of it is very weird. Is the niche targeting of lonely old plant guys now a thing we should be concerned about? Fortunately, the basic template is the same as for a general profile without garden elements. Learn to recognize the basic hallmarks, as laid out in this post, and you will likely be able to see right through it.

I was amused by this exchange. Eileen planted lotus flowers in a vacant lot behind her house. In Denver, a semiarid USDA Zone 5 climate with winters often below -10 F / -23 C. Uh huh, sounds about right. But I do believe her because she does after all have copious spare time to garden on vacant lots after she’s done with covering the fields of wine import and export, cryptocurrency, real estate, healthcare, hotels, gold, and precious metals. I’m disappointed that she doesn’t have foreign exchange trading on the list, but I like to imagine that it’s simply an oversight she forgot to mention. It all sounds perfectly plausible, right? She said so in her message to me earlier!

Only AI can write like this. Nice AI cat.

Despite her serial harassment, spamming, and porn experiences Eileen sure has managed to curate a nice profile spanning all the way back to August 24, 2024, which is 6.5 months ago! This is positively ancient for a scammer. Most of them are merely days or weeks old. Her friend count has not increased much and stands at 19 today. But her photo count stands at well over 100 images and 30 or more separate posts. The length of a fake profile does provide reassurance of sincerity – until you actually start reading them.

I wanted to be sure that Viburnum didn’t look like this so I googled it. News flash: It doesn’t. WTF is up with the linguistics again?

Secondary news flash: Rhododendrons and azaleas do not grow in the Colorado greenbelt. To the uneducated it might pass off as credible, but to me she might as well have said that they thrive in the Mojave Desert too.

Oops! Wrong holiday greetings! While Christmas stuff surely is already (and obnoxiously) being sold in stores as soon as late August or Labor Day, no one starts already wishing others Merry Christmas when it’s still Halloween. Almost everyone waits at least until Thanksgiving is over before saying it.

This is a very weird food review. There are several attempts at these on Eileen’s timeline, and none of them get off the launch pad. I did verify that there is in fact a “Smokin’ Dave’s BBQ and Brew” in Estes Park, CO. While online photos of their food do seem to mainly use paper liners featuring their own name and logo, I also did find a couple of examples utilizing ones featuring “The Daily Telegraph”, which is a UK paper. But do you really want your ribeye steak to be crunchy? My review of her reviews thus stands.

The wine reviews are as honest and sensible as the food reviews are. 10 stars out of 10 for Eileen’s wine import/export business. Would definitely recommend!

Eileen enjoyed her day trip to go dog sledding. I bet that you weren’t aware of the fact that caribou roam wild in Colorado. Well Eileen’s post verifies this claim beyond the shadow of a doubt. The Rocky Mountain caribou, once thought to be either mythical or extinct, are not visible in this partial screenshot, but trust me bro, they are real! Also the lack of mountains is not something to be concerned about – it’s just the angle at which every photo was taken.

Thus concludes my comprehensive examination of a bona-fide Facebook scam account, replete with a personalized conversation. I probably spent WAY too much time on this over the past week, on and off, but it was worthwhile to highlight the field marks of fake behavior. No matter how crazy my stories and claims got, the only thing that made the scammer listen was when I pointed out that WhatsApp is full of them and that I wasn’t going to migrate the convo over to that platform. Well a bit of return phishing was kind of fun, but I don’t necessarily think I’ll do it again. I’ll return to my usual activity of immediately blocking them as they appear. After all, there does seem to be an endless supply of them.