@ pa mantis:
Senegalese refugee scammers like this one often start with a romance approach, but most rather quickly move to a straight advance-fee approach, making this more or less a hybrid of the two.
I am going to address the email address thing once, but we are not going to turn this thread into yet another debate about email addresses. There are plenty of discussions on the forums already, and our position, which is based on a lot of experience, is not going to change.
Closing their email would disrupt their communication with anyone who was currently hooked: they’d have to explain to their unwitting victims(s) why they’ve had to change their email.
Oh, how I wish this actually helped.
Any scammer with experience is prepared to lose their email box, and they will keep a record of the addresses of any victims with real potential. As for explaining changing their email, I can't even begin to tell you how many times we have seen the simple "I got a new email because I was hacked" or even simpler "my email wasn't working so I opened a new one" in the middle of the scam. When it's a free dating site profile that disappears, the scammer simply says, "I closed my profile because I met you." The scam keeps going without missing a beat, the victim none the wiser.
Unfortunately, the kind of person who is going to believe that some good-looking young woman is sitting in a refugee camp waiting for them to help her collect her millions is
not the kind of person who is going to question that explanation and assume the address was closed for fraud.
When "Joy" approaches new targets, some of them who don't know whether it is a scam will actually make the effort to google "
[email protected]." When they do that, they will find lots of things that tell them "she" is a scam.
But when someone closes that email address, and in less than 5 minutes, the scammer opens and switches to "
[email protected]" or one of the tens of thousands of other possible addresses, initially there will be nothing about the new address. So the next several potential victims that come along and google "
[email protected]" will NOT learn she is a scammer, and some who might have been warned will instead be pulled in.
Perhaps someday email providers will change their policies, and they will either notify contacts that the email was closed for fraud, or find a way to prevent that person from opening another address 5 minutes later. If/when that happens, we will certainly revisit our position.
