Multinational Crisis Part 5: Takeaways

If you had no idea there were people trying to defraud women and men online, you probably have been on a long staycation in the jungles of the Amazon, or you live under a rock. This is happening hundreds of thousands of times a day to as many people as possible.

If you are not the victim of a scam, then it is someone you know or a family member. Of this, I have no doubt. None. Please don’t get indignant if you have gone undisturbed by this fraud, because it is harming people; it causes decreased self-worth and self-esteem. It also causes depression, fear, and devastation. It is no laughing matter and should not be dismissed.

On that note, if and when you come across a person who has undergone the tragic changes to their lives because of some romance grift, be kind, for heaven’s sake. These crimes have no color, no race, no specified sex preference. The crime is non-discriminatory. At least something in this world is. Not a consolation, I know. It does not work only on the ignorant (stupid); scams target intelligent, perfectly capable people. The same goes for women versus men. Both sexes are being targeted.

AI’s Role

Understand that these men and women speaking with an imposter are maybe naive, but not dumb. The scammer is adept at this game. They have the power of the internet behind them, cryptocurrency, and now, the wonderfully new fly in the ointment of AI.

AI is dangerous; make no mistake about it. It moves information and technological advancement into a new millennium and uncharted waters. No more can you trust a voice of a human. Those can be altered and made so real, you would die on your sword, arguing it was real. No more can you trust a video chat, or call, or message; AI can manipulate everything you see.

I have an informant in Nigeria who sent me a video of a live video chat session between a person ( a regular person) and a famous movie star. The video showed the scammer seated in front of the camera and computer screen. It also showed the person “on the other end of the video call” and a third computer running the AI program that changed the scammer's features and voice to match the actor's. What the recipient saw was the actor in real time, speaking to them as if it were you and your mom on a FaceTime call. No lie!!

The flaws were so minimal that a person would have to look very carefully to see them. Backgrounds can be manipulated to appear genuine. What I mean by that is, if a celebrity scammer, chatting via video, were to say they were at a bistro in Paris, that is exactly what you would see behind them. Other people, traffic, breezes, all looking real, but not real. If I had not seen it, I would have doubted it. It was scary.

I cannot say this enough: trust nothing you hear or see on the internet anymore. I know everyone has seen or is seeing many new reels for incredible things that are all AI. Anything from amazing animal acts to amazing views of storms and accidents is being watched every day. Some of the makers of these clips are becoming very rich making them. Cats driving, Jesus swimming at a meet but running on the top of the water, space videos, and so on, are spilling all over the place. While those are funny, scams are not.

Which Social Media are being used?

Texting or chat is fun, but it is being used for evil. Celebrities, actors, musicians, military generals, and reality TV stars do not chat with anyone they don’t know online, in private, or otherwise. They do not use Telegram, MS Teams, Signal, Zangi, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Lemon8, TikTok, WhatsApp, or any app to have private conversations with YOU! They choose a different place to have that secret conversation with you, to sites that have very little protections and guards against fraudulent activity. Most, if not all, allow the participants to mask or hide their phone numbers. By the way, the country code for Nigeria is 234. If you see a phone number, though, most of the time now it's legit-looking American. You can thank proxy servers and VPNs for that. The chat sites can be used for good, and certainly they are, but most of these will not protect you, the victim. They will protect anonymity.

Do not trust social media. If they are making a buck, they never saw an infraction. And they see nothing when it comes to these cyber crimes. Now, go ahead and post a boob drawn in watercolor, and you’ll think you committed a capital crime. This is the idiocy of the internet. They are more worried about the business account that did not use royalty-free music in its ad than about the thousands of profiles for each personality. This seems ludicrous to me. A computer can run an identification program, a name scan, and go through its own database for redundancies, but it can’t see and find two hundred actors with the same name and profile picture? That is beyond ridiculous. We all know it should be done.

Some tips

So what can you do if no one has your back? Be proactive. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. Complain! Report continuously!

Complain, report, and expose every single incident. Do it to the platform, post it on the celebrity, general, or anyone else’s page that has been used. Do it often and every time you see it happen.

One of the best ways to put a dent in this activity is to warn, alert, and warn again everyone you see commenting with a profile name that matches the person whose page you are viewing. What I mean by this is: you make a comment, and then someone clicks like or replies to your comment, and you notice actor so-and-so has all these women commenting, followed by replies from said actor, but with another profile pic or no pic at all. Many times the name will have numbers after it (i.e., Joe Shmoe263). Imposter! Message the women or men you see that have been contacted, and tell them. If you've been scammed yourself, don’t hide it; let them know your experience. Don’t let the opportunity go by. If you see a manager, public relations person, secretary, or internet relations person saying they can get you or anyone in touch with the celebrity, report them, block them, and warn anyone engaging with them. These are all scammers.

Imposter’s tactics

The tactics that are being used change as they wear out the usual suspects. I have experienced them all so far. Actors, their varying staff, their mothers, their children, their charities, are all used to get into your wallet and under your skin. Shameful right?

The drama they give you when you ask for help changes, too. From they need to get to their kids, or send something to their kids, to mothers texting you for help because their “son/daughter” the celeb is in the hospital or had an accident, and they need your help, to accounts being frozen for reasons from legal to wives or ex-lovers taking their money or accounts. They get so creative and believable sometimes. Remember that they make a crap ton of money and will never need your measly dollars to do anything. They have people for everything, even money managers.

Military officers, don’t ask civilians for help. They don’t get into money problems and ask strangers for money or crypto. That is a violation of their code.

For any and all new people in your message boxes, go to their profiles. Take a screenshot, look at their friends list. Look at their posts. Look at their profile pic and any and all conversations on their page. You will begin to see patterns. Low followers, vague posts, or posts about things you have seen all over the internet in a Google search. But be aware that none of these ideas are foolproof or static. I have seen people with verified badges who know they are fake. They have people that can do that. I have seen profiles with millions of followers that were created one day before. They can manipulate that as well. I have experienced them pretending to be a person's child, being permitted to chat with you, and the whole time you have been speaking to a child that was paid to type what they were being told, but obviously in a child’s vernacular.

You won’t determine a person's validity by speaking to them in their native language. They use Google Translate. It does not end.

If all else fails and you are targeted again and again like I was, get wise. Stop viewing the person or celebrity’s site, page, reels, postings, or anything related to them. Unfollow, click uninterested if you see a posting flash on your feed, and so on. They will still find you and try you, but the traffic will slow. I used to get between 10 and 20 hits per day on a single entity I followed or commented on.

Does it stop: No

Now, after this entire year and well over 200 (more like 250 by now) people targeting me, the targeting of a single celeb has slowed. Not ended. Slowed. The difference is that now I do not reply to them; I post the words I gave you all in these articles and follow them to the letter. I have unfollowed every celebrity or famous person who tried to scam me, and I do not engage with that side of the coin, no matter what.

Why you should take a stand

The most important thing is to get the message out there. Do not be ashamed. Be bold. Take pride in helping others with your experience. Feel good about yourself for figuring it out, at any stage of the scam, and for helping others avoid it. Be an advocate. If you can spare one, you have accomplished something honorable and to be proud of. Own it.

There is no way to stop this mess. The only way would be for these men and women defrauding hundreds of thousands to take control of their nation, demand better from their government, demand a different government, and want to be better people. They have to want to get out of this criminal lifestyle badly enough to make a change. Barring that, they will continue to be oppressed by corruption in their governing people.

We cannot do much; the celebrity is not doing much, if anything; the social media, well, forget about them being active participants in quelling cybercrime. Not even the FBI or Interpol can keep up. I have a contact in the FBI, and they are overwhelmed. They can’t get them all, and only get a few.

Parting words

Before I say adieu, I want to say this. Pay attention. The Nigerian people are really wonderful people, in a desperate situation. If you were starving and living in a home with dirt floors, you might be desperate enough to do shady things too. Remember that. Even the scammers are lovely people when they shrug off the lies and get real with you. They are humble, sweet, and sadly naive about the world around them. They know only extreme poverty and this.

Not all are this poor, not all commit crimes on the internet, not all scam without impunity. Many yes, but not all. I have seen some of these men get out of this work just by being kind and explaining to them what they are doing to their victims. I have encouraged them to leave cyber scamming, and a couple of them have changed. That is a little something. A drop in the ocean.

No one wins in these scams. There is no winning. The only way to win is not to play the game at all.

Don’t be afraid to reach out

I will answer any questions I see in the comments on these posted articles, and on any site. Women, men, anyone. So if you are unsure of something, ask. If this has happened to you and you need to vent, vent. I did this to be there for you. I am present.

Thank you for sticking with me and for taking the time to read this series. I appreciate it, sincerely.

Published on Medium, 2026