In these low level grifting waters, it’s not the sharks you need to worry about, it’s the Catfish.
Let’s put out a traditional catfish scam scenario for those not aware. Our target, Callie, is a fairly recently widowed 50 year old woman, because even though you can’t swing a dead cat on Facebook without hitting an obviously fake super model hot account, it does happen to women as the targets, too. She’s not freshly widowed and still grieving, but is posting FB content where her concerned friends are talking about how she has come to terms with the husband’s passing and is starting to be happy again. The kind of person that doesn’t need having her savings stolen on top of the death of their spouse.
One day, there is a friend request from Hank. Hank is not a new recruit (not enough glamour) and also not a high ranking officer (not believable that a four star general would have interest in Callie), so Hank has pictures (hijacked off the internet) of him in his sergeant uniform. And boy is he handsome. Hank starts liking Callie’s posts, posting some laughing emojis at her jokes and final direct messages her, striking up a one on one message exchange relationship.
Hank, in reality is a 14 year old boy from Ghana, with limited English, but he does have a set of scripted fake stories and people higher up in the scam that have been around awhile. The goal is to use every bit of old info Callie posted to make it seem like Hank is a dream come true. Then it’s time for the tragedy. The tragedy is preceded by a, “Hey, I have leave coming up in a week. Let’s finally meet up and go for dinner.” But, it turns out that when the plans are set and Hank is supposedly on his way, in his rush to meet Callie he messed up his leave paperwork and is detained at the airport. And somehow there are magically no other Hank friends to get him out of being stuck. Only Callie’s PayPal account can rescue him.
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These are the kinds of things that make it not matter if someone truly believes in gematria or 9/11 being hoax. Scammers from all over the world, not just some creepy perv at the bar, have access to genuine personal information freely posted on social media. They recognize the cognitive biases brought on by the state of mind of a deceased love one and do not care if the target gets hurt even more. The best defense remains the properly skeptical thought that it’s unlikely a handsome military guy with limited social media presence would get involved with Callie. And Callie would be best off ignoring him.
The scams have been around for a long time, and the scripts are fine tuned and superficially believable. Here’s some examples of how some of the variations occur in gematria community interactions - remember that it’s a group of people that have already been shown to be susceptible to some rather silly things.
1). This is one I’ve personally experienced. The “girl” posted some weird spiritual related content with a side dish of hot hippie chick vibe. And her email address. So I emailed her and got the story of how she was raped by her father and that’s all I needed to see. The initial comment she made was on a YouTube account of a new gematria user who started popping up on Zach’s videos.
2). It’s perfectly believable that somebody gullible enough to believe that they can win money gambling on sports picks decided after the game is over might be a pain in the ass in real life. “I lost my job because Tammy told Human Resources I lied about getting vaccinated. Here’s my PayPal address so you can help me get through these tough times.” Or, you are homeless living in your car because you got thrown in jail. Or you got got scammed by a flat earther. Just like Callie and Hank, any sad story of how unfair life is because the evil cabal did this and that and woe is me. And again from personal experience, I’ve seen the guy who lost his job, house, car and credibility in the truth community get back on his feet within weeks and start decoding again.
3). This fits into the Shill Game. The constant accusations among truth seekers regarding who is legit and who is not trustworthy. Although there is genuine animosity between different conspiracy specialists overall content (e.g. anti-vaxx vs. gematria) and the cliques within gematria (sports, crypto, spirituality/synchronicity) there isn’t anybody that seems to have gotten the bright idea to up their game and show that they are serious about getting revenge for being scammed. The different backgrounds are easier to understand - don’t you dare pay attention to vaccination stuff, gematria is what’s important. The different gematria cliques operate like a big unhappy family arguing about politics at Thanksgiving dinner. Well sometimes a friendly and hopeful message is better than arguing about watching the Thanksgiving Day games or Fox News. Please stop fighting and can’t we just all get along? My overpriced crypto store items are better than those failed sports predictions or the PayPal account of that end of times Evangelical fire and brimstone preacher.
There’s a lot of pressure to pick a side TODAY.
4). Friendly sock puppets. Use the main account to identify and do research on the new targets. Load them up with ego boosting messages, maybe through them a couple of bucks to prime the pump - encourage them to produce content of their own. Content that won’t generally get a lot of attention because the cult leader personalities have a better grip on what to say and do. A newbie also wants to see that other newbies have recently woken up, the same way somebody new to Alcoholics Anonymous is presented with other hand raisers who have just joined and sober for the same amount of time. Look! I just donated money (to myself, only paying the Patreon or PayPal processing fee)! You can be enlightened more by paying too!
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Just like the catfish grifting outside gematria accounts the variations are unlimited and only bound by the imagination and psychological prowess of the content author. In many respects, the person that wants to demonstrate being good and being known for doing good is better than the person that thinks that doing good means getting liquored up, pick up a gun, and going to the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor they were told was involved in trafficking children. Deep down there’s some spark of humanity left that has been struggling with the failed predictions and wants an out. They don’t want to lose yet another job because they refuse to take their ADHD medication since they have no real friends. They are like Callie, the last people that need to be scammed on top of not having actual solutions to actual problems.
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