Sept. 1, 2026
Back in the old days, the only kind of fraudulent contacts we used to get was when some bored teenager randomly called us on the phone and asked if our refrigerator was running. “Well, you’d better chase it down before it gets away.” Yea, that was back in the days when we didn’t have the internet. A much simpler and stupider time. Now, we’ve got all kinds of folks contacting us, and very few of them are concerned about my refrigerator.
A few weeks ago I received a test message from someone who had found me on LinkedIn and was interested in my career at Texas Instruments. However, their big interest was the fact that I lived in the Sherman, Texas area of North Texas. This captivated soul claimed that their parents were interested in moving to Sherman for their golden years, and they wanted to learn more about the community. I actually thought this was kind of cool, and being the friendly person I am, I turned into a regular Chamber of Commerce concerning my city. I gave the whole rundown of the area while dishing out all the goods regarding the local arts and music scene, movie theaters, bowling alleys, restaurants, and even rolled out the lowdown concerning local shopping! After my reply I didn’t expect to receive a response, but the next thing I knew I was getting a hefty text of thankful praise from this person, telling me that I been such a help to their parents.
I was then asked how the community might accept Asian people. I responded by saying that I was pretty sure that Sherman, Texas would welcome Asian people as well as anyone else. So, this is how I discovered that I was texting with an Asian person here. An Asian woman. When she sent me a photo of her applying her face cream, I discovered I was texting with an attractive Asian woman. Quite the looker, in fact! She gave me the rundown concerning how Asian girls are devoted to skin care. Okay, that’s no big news. My last boss applied sunscreen every day just for her drive to work. However, because this was quite the attractive dish here, in her thirties, my scam BS alert suddenly began to flash in my head. WARNING! WARNING! Step away from the hot babe! This is not a drill!
This wasn’t the first time I had been hit up by some attractive Asian woman on social media. The last one came through FACEBOOK a few years ago. This Chinese lady (who lived in the California Bay area) was quite the little honey, and everything was quite cordial until I finally convinced her that I had no interest in investing with her bitcoin company. And that brought about the end of our conversation. However, the young lady who contacted me this time, who was also originally from China, had put a little more thought into her approach. I must say that the whole, “My parents are interested in retiring to your community” ploy was a nice touch. It was far better than the usual scam story.
Of course, there were no sexual innuendos going on here. It was just light conversation, but don’t they all start that way? Like the first contact, this young lady talked about what she was eating for lunch and shot out a few photos of her lunch as well as her gym. She even gave me a rundown of her daily workout routine and even provided a video of her designer shoes and black stockings walking down the hallway to her daily job. And who knows, she very well may have been going to work. Once again, I’ll commend her for a nice touch.
I kept waiting for the subject of bitcoin to come up, but so far it hadn’t, so out of pure curiosity (and having nothing better to do) I decided to play along just to see how long this might last. I certainly wasn’t providing any personal info to her, and I basically just talked about recent movies I’d seen as well as my past vacations and a few upcoming concerts. This inspired her to show off a few of her own world travels. Although her tales of trekking across the globe were intriguing, there was one major issue with her vacation photos. They all looked like a photo shot for Vogue magazine. Her snow skiing vacation photos even came with a music video. I’ve been snow skiing a few times in my life, but I’ve never seen any of the young snow bunnies out on the slopes showing off quite that much midriff. Indeed, the young lady was quite the scrumptious dish, and her vacation photos were nothing less than stunning, but anyone who couldn’t tell that this was a scam in the making probably shouldn’t be allowed to handle sharp objects.
Through texting, the young lady told me a little about her job, a little about her parents, a little about her friends, and even told me how her ex-husband had cheated on her. When she mentioned her hobbies, she threw out a few subtle hints that one of her big hobbies involved investing with her mysterious uncle who seemed to be the financial guru of the Far East. She also laid out the fact that she was planning to retire at the age of forty. My thoughts regarding that subject was, “Who the heck wants to retire at forty?” Such a question seemed to confuse her a bit. So she threw in some more cool chit chat. She even greeted me one morning with a “Happy holiday!” regarding the Qixi Festival, which I’m guessing is a bit like the Chinese version of Valentines Day. She even threw in some tale about a cow herder and a weaver girl. In my mind, it was a deeply weird story, but I’m guessing it was supposed to be romantic.
Finally the subject matter of investments came into play, and she started telling me how she was rolling in dough, and she asked me if I was familiar with short term investments. Here she explained the strategy of how I could trade in both directions while raking in the profits whether the stocks went up or down. Okay, I’ve heard of folks becoming quite successful with this type of trading, but I doubt if many of them got their investing tips from some cute Chinese girl they met on social media. I basically told her I had people for that kind of stuff, and they do a great job. With that statement, I never heard from her again. Who knows, perhaps she was a legit trader and just had a thing for belly shirts while snow skiing.
I suppose there are several effective ways to handle people like this. Mine have always fallen under the rules of just being polite and make sure they don’t learn anything about me that they couldn’t learn from my social media posts. However, I guess I could handle these type of invitations the way I used to handle pyramid sale pitches. Way back in my mid-twenties when I first started working for Texas Instruments one of my co-workers was a young guy who was hopelessly devoted to some kind of get rich, pyramid scheme. One day at work I casually asked him if he had any plans for the upcoming weekend. Big mistake! He was going to some network marking, selling stupid crap, become a millionaire before you turn thirty seminar, and he was more than happy to tell me all about it. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more than happy!
In hopes to add to his pyramid network, this dude would launch into his sales pitch with the question, “What’s your dream car?” Of course, he’d ask that question hoping my answer would be some type of Corvette or BMW or some other car that I couldn’t afford on my Texas Instruments base salary. Then he would dive into his pitch on how I could make a pile of quick cash and be able to afford such a dream car. When I told him that I was into vintage, 1970’s Ford Pintos he’d usually just look at me weird. By the time I told him that my dream home was a singlewide trailer house, I think he was getting the message. Just like dealing with the cute Chinese girl, I was always polite but also very cautious.
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