Over the summer, i was contacted by a Taiwanese celebrity over Twitter. She’s hot and gorgeous! Who would say no to a celebrity reaching out to you? Of course, looking at all her tweets set off red flags. I ignored her mostly until recently. I was curious to know this spammer’s strategy.
First, imagine a celebrity with Twitter. You might think of tweets and pictures about awesome new restaurants and food, thanking fans, retweeting news articles, interacting with fans or other celebrities, etc.
Nope, not from this person. She reached out to hundreds of other people just to be friends, asked them to follow her back, etc. ALL OF THEM. Some other red flags:
- her phone is a “Nokia.” This is a weak argument, but don’t most celebrities use an iPhone or Samsung smart phone?
- When i asked about connecting with her on Facebook, she sends me a Facebook link indeed. Instead of the “+1 Add Friend,” there was the “Subscribe” button…so that link was to a fan page…
- vacationing in Ukraine for 3 months…? Really?
Anyway, for the last few weeks, i decided to talk to this supposed Taiwanese celebrity. What’s his/her motivation? Well, i figured it out. This news article sums it up: Seduced into scams: Online lovers often duped
In short, cyber-thieves are patient enough to develop a relationship and then dupe you into sending a money deposit. I’m impressed with the amount of patience and dedication to fake a relationship.
Below is one piece of evidence of the scam. I told the celebrity i doubted her credibility, and asked for a photo of her eating a Wendy’s burger (because she talked about it a few times). She tweeted back with the pic:
Then i checked her tweet timeline. It turns out the photo came from a peer:
Notice the time stamp for these two tweets. Two minutes apart.
Secondly, the pic from the peer had a comment, so i used Google Translate to see what it meant:
Google detected that the language was in Indonesian!
To follow up, i did a Google image search on the photo:
Over 100 search results. One result showed that the photo dated back to Sept 2012. By the way, there are no Wendy’s in Ukraine.
Then i asked her if she took the pic just for me:
Eventually, i made a slip. I was doing research on this celebrity and discovered she only uses Weibo, not Twitter. I also found a Facebook comment in one fan group that questioned the credibility of the account @lycariel. I left a comment on that group about how @lycariel is a spammer. That was discovered quick by @officialyangmi (no idea who she is, probably a partner in crime), @lycarial changed her account name and her tweets are gone. She also added to her bio that she’s the official celebrity…sad that ppl are falling for this scam. Notice that the Facebook language is set to French. For an Asian celebrity? Hm, sure. Okay.
Btw, the new Twitter handle is @modellinichen (twitter page: https://twitter.com/modellinichen), so beware. Her (or “his”?) partner in crime is @lin_selvi