Tell us what's happened to you recently (that's interesting)

I don’t remember how to meet people! Seriously! Do you just walk up to an attractive woman and introduce yourself? At least when I was younger there were parties and stuff.

Both of these statements are true, but there are no ways as convenient as online dating, nor is there another way to meet such a wide range of people who are specifically looking for dates. It also is a good way to get practice dating again after being out of it for awhile. I used to compare online dating to travelling by flying: it’s possibly the worst way to do it in almost every way, but its convenience trumps every other concern. (I used this comparison on dates as an icebreaker, and it invariably worked great. Feel free to borrow.)

Online dating isn’t a bad way. There are also Meetups that have mixers specifically for this. You can ask your friends if they know any single people looking. That’s ultimately how my gf and I hooked up: through a mutual friend. If you ever find yourself needing to do it, it’s not too hard to climb back on the horse, and online dating is a great crutch for it.

I mean, I have been out there for most of a decade now and this is the first time I ever ran into something like this. And frankly, it was suspicious immediately and I could easily have bailed then. I was just gambling because if it had been legit it could have been really good. Lesson learned. And probably no real harm done.

I think the Meetup groups are a good way to meet people because meeting in person is superior to the back and forth of email for online dating, and even phone calls.

I’ve done both and you can connect with someone online and spend time and energy emailing, and then time and energy on the phone, and then you meet and there’s no chemistry whatsoever and neither of you want to see the other ever again.

At the very least if anyone wants to do online stuff I’d suggest cutting to the chase as soon as possible and offer to meet for coffee.

Anyway, it’s been over 10 years since I’ve plunged into online dating, so I don’t even know what it’s like now. Tinder wasn’t around then, or if it was I was unaware of it.

Yes, this is a pro-tip. I started doing this after a couple of months. As soon as someone interesting answered my initial chats, I’d ask to meet up, with a time and place specified. I rarely got turned down. If they’re chatting they usually are also interested in meeting.

This is actually very a common scam, for both men and sometimes women. If you actually had gotten naked on camera she or he would have certainly captured pics. And the blackmail begins. The Today I Fucked Up (r/tifu) subreddit has stories about this almost daily. You were smart and didn’t fall into the trap. Good luck in the future.

I figured that was the play. No way I am doing that shit with someone 12 hours in, even if they seem 100% legit, and they never did. It would amaze me that people do fall for that but I mean, I halfway did and I could see the signs. Someone who thinks people act IRL like they do in porn…

@malkav11 sorry to burst your bubble so to speak but it sounds like you are getting setup for something like this:

Be careful out there.

Yes, we’ve established that was the game. We’ve also established they failed and I have blocked them. So I appreciate the concern but I think the past tense is appropriate in this case.

I have to ask: does the “her Mic is not working” mean anything in the scheme?

It means they’re using prerecorded video and whoever’s running the scam doesn’t want to talk and reveal they’re really some 50 year old dude in Siberia or whatever.

Bingo.

Aha, that makes sense. For some reason I was assuming this was in real time.

I received an email notification that I had a login to my Instagram account from a new device that I usually don’t use. The thing is, I don’t have an Instagram account. My immediate thought is it is fishing, but Gmail didn’t flag it, and my own inspection showed it looked like a legit email from Instagram. I used to have a Facebook account, but I had deleted it a little while ago. I figured that maybe those ever so ethical people at Facebook created an Instagram account for me automatically without my requesting it.

I tried my old Facebook password and no dice so I requested a password reset. I follow the steps to change the password, and now I am in the account. It’s clearly not my account. There are some pictures of a dude with his wife and kid. My email is [email protected] and this dude’s profile shows his name is clearly not remotely close to mine. I’m not really happy with this state of affairs.

Is this some sort of new scam? My googling didn’t turn up anything. I monitor my email frequently and would have seen an email confirmation request. So I do not think my email account has been hacked. I did read somewhere in my googling that it is possible for somebody to sign up to Instagram and somehow route confirmations to their Facebook account bypassing any real verification of the email address. If so, that’s not exactly security best practice, but then again this is Facebook.

If somebody is stupid enough to use my email address to sign up to Instagram, they get what’s coming. I deleted the account permanently.

Is it a bot? If you have a reasonably common first.last pattern, that seems relatively likely.

Same thing happened to me with an Epic Games account. It had no money or games attached to it, so I kept it.

It didn’t look like a bot. There was an attempt to change the user name but not email address.

So a bunch of former co-workers who all remain pretty close due to going through Some Shit together are getting together for a happy hour, ostensibly in celebration of my new job (yay!) but mostly because it’s been a while and we want to hang out. Awesome!

And of course one dude, who is a generally nice dude but who definitely has some social awkwardness about him, responds to me privately from the group text: “Hey, do you know if OtherDude is going to be there? I’m over that guy.”

face. palm.

“I dunno, I invited him but haven’t heard back specifically, didn’t know you guys had beef.”

“Oh, no big deal. I just think he’s shady.”

My god. It’s like real-life vaguebooking. It was all worth it, though, for this response from someone else involved who I facepalmed at about it:

“I guess he’ll just have to make a grown-ass-man decision about whether he can occupy the same room.”

Being home alone on my gap week, I was free to give that the full-throated chuckle it deserved. The time I have for this junior-high drama bullshit in my mid-late 30s approaches zero. Good grief.

I may be missing an aspect of this interaction, but I don’t really get why this seems so out of line? Personality conflicts don’t stop happening in junior high. If one of your friends doesn’t want particularly like another one, seems fair to ask if they can expect that friend to be present. But if they did decide to ditch your little shindig just because of that, it would seem a little petty. Also -

I feel like the semantic ground is constantly shifting under my feet, every day I come across a word I’ve never seen before.

Basically making vague Facebook posts in (semi) public about social drama without giving details.