Wayne's story

[Wayne]

I guess I should explain how I ended up here. It's all very simple, and it started off with a Google search on "funny".

*cue wavy lines effect as we go back in time*

Back in 2005, I was doing some random searches on Google for funny stuff. I'd find a link, read it, look for a link to another site on that one and click it. One of my clicks led me to a quiz called "What OS are you?". I did the quiz, and then it offered me another one, "What Nigerian spammer are you?". This was the first time I'd heard of Nigerian spammers, so I Googled the result and found a baiting site. Baiting, for those who don't know, is when a person pretends to be a victim to a scammer. They play along, then attempt to get the scammer to do silly things. It's a fun hobby, but not for everyone. The rest of the night was spent reading the baits and thinking "These scammers are DUMB! I can do this!!". So that night I joined the forum and found my first scammer to torment.

A month later, as I was about to go to bed, I had a message pop up on instant messenger. My first romance scammer had literally fallen into my lap. I spent about an hour talking to "her", knowing full well it was really a male scammer pretending to be a female. I felt horrible. Really dirty. I'm a straight, red blooded male. Pretending to fall in love with someone I knew was really a male made my skin crawl. Then someone said to me, "If that's how YOU felt, THEY must feel 100 times worse, as they have to pretend to be a female" and it was like a lightbulb went off above my head. I was going to REALLY make the scammer feel uncomfortable. Thus began my obsession with baiting romance scammers and my crude interactions with them. If you haven't seen my baits, you can check them out on www.romancescambaiter.com but be aware they ARE crude and over the top.

Very few people were baiting romance scammers at the time, so I was constantly being asked to bait scammers either as revenge for scamming someone, or as proof they were scammers. As a result, I began talking more and more to the people who had been scammed and my priorities changed from having fun with the scammers to helping people who had been scammed. I was offered moderator and then admin duties on two different forums that concentrated solely on romance scammers. The two forums were merged into one after a while. Now I was concentrating only on helping those who had been scammed and it felt like the right thing to be doing. I would still dabble with baiting from time to time, but most of my time was spent working with scam survivors. During this time, I published three books. Two were about the funny things scammers say and one was about scam survivors. Last month, big changes happened on the site and I decided it was time to move on, create a site myself that was dedicated to helping scam survivors and have it concentrate on being a place that scam survivors can feel they're not alone. And so scamsurvivors was born. Some of the friends I've made along the way have followed me here, and I thank them for it.

So that's how ended up here. I was never scammed. I came in via baiting and stayed for the chance to help people.

[Tomi]

Thank you Mr. Wayne for this site & for your efforts to help others.