Confession of a Professional Catfish

From Zero Hedge:

Beard worked night shifts, 12 hours a day, six days a week, pretending to be a woman named Annie to deceive victims. The scam centre housed over 1,000 workers, mostly foreign migrants from Africa and India, all controlled by a Chinese-run syndicate. Workers were confined to the premises, only leaving to buy food from vendors serving the scammers.

Victims, already catfished on dating apps, believed they were chatting with a woman who led a glamorous lifestyle. Beard’s job was to extract financial information and convince them to invest in cryptocurrency.

“It’s not the important information I give them,” he explained. “It’s the important information I got out of them.”

A real woman, half-Turkish, half-Ukrainian, was employed to take brief video calls to reassure victims they weren’t being scammed. “She had a line of people waiting for her to also talk to other victims.”

Read the whole thing.