It's a bit of an impulsive thing, but I was checking my spam folder and noticed one of those "I've watched you from afar" type emails.
Greetings! It was long time ago I run across your email address on the internet, though I couldn't dare to get in contact with you. It is not easy for me to message a man first. I'd like to say that I am a genuine and upstanding woman. I don't want to deal with scammers. Important, if you only have got an intention to ask me for my photos where I am naked or my money, never contact me back. Done? I've got an unusual name for you – AIDANA. I am 37 years old. I stay in Kazakhstan and it is a large country in Central Asia. To get the info where it is situated you can just google it. The difference in age is not something important to me, whatsmore I am more interested in older men. In case you have a spark looking at my photos and reading this email, I am waiting to get a message from you. I am eager to know the facts about yourself, your town and your country. Do you enjoy living there??? As kind reminder a nice idea to repeat that I am only looking for a serious and truthful relationship. My intention does not include any games, sharing photos with me naked or constant talks about sex intercourse.
I thought I might lead the scammer on a bit to see where it goes - obviously from a disposable account.
Activity
18-Jan-25 14:35
assigned to @btasker
18-Jan-25 14:35
moved from project-management-only/staging#9
18-Jan-25 14:35
assigned to @btasker
18-Jan-25 14:42
OK, so the mail is this - I've blurred email addresses because the claimed sending mail is almost certainly an innocent but compromised account
The attachment is a pretty woman eating a meal and holding up her wine.
A reverse image search didn't reveal any organic matches but did show a couple of anti-scam listings (like this). It looks like the scammer consistently uses the name Aidana, though the email they ask to be contacted on is different.
A quick search of my spam box for
Aidanashows a number of different attemptsEach came from a different email address - all have domains in southeast easia (most are
.jpbut there is a.tw)The contact mail (
kroxakzake@gmail.com) is consistent across almost all of them, apart from one which asks me to contact them atdevochkamedikfialka@gmail.com.Across these emails, there are 3 different photos - the one I described before, another which is that photo cropped in a bit and third which is of a completely different woman wearing a cat-ear headband and stretching her legs out in front of a Xmas tree.
I'm not attaching them here because I may make this ticket public at some point and they are not AI generated - they're photos of real women that have been stolen from somewhere.
There's no metadata on the image that's particularly interesting in telling us anything about the spammer.
However, they do all carry the IPTC tag
iptc.application2.SpecialInstructionsThat
FBMDprefix tells us where the images came from. Facebook is known to add that metadata to uploaded images.18-Jan-25 14:43
I used a random name generator to create myself a name
And have set up an email address under that name
18-Jan-25 14:44
changed the description
18-Jan-25 14:55
I've put together a reply - as I writing it, I realised that I don't really know how their marks would normally respond.
So I kept it fairly short and simple
18-Jan-25 15:01
So, now we wait...
If I don't hear anything back I'll move this ticket to public so that others can find it
21-Jan-25 20:00
changed title from Reply to spammer to Reply to spammer{+ - Aidana+}
21-Jan-25 20:00
No reply... I've been jilted by a romance scammer...
OK, moving this to be public in case it helps someone the scammer does want to respond to.