Scam the Facebook Scammer Back

Someone on Facebook Wants to Make Me Rich Using Bitcoin

Someone wants to make me rich using bitcoin.

I have Twitter and LinkedIn for business relationships, but my Facebook account is only for personal family and friends. I occasionally get Friend requests from people I don’t know. They are usually friends of friends or people who follow my writing or my other business accounts and are reaching out to see if they can follow me on Facebook. I humbly decline. And sometimes the requests are from scammers. Usually, the scammers are claiming to be young, model-beautiful, but apparently very lonely, women who just can’t wait to friend me and find their one true love. I am apparently quite the catch.

Today, I got a Facebook friend request from someone claiming to be Osman Gauin. As I was going to decline, that account also sent me a “Hello” message in Facebook Messenger. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just “Hello”. These singular “hellos” are almost always scammers. Curious, I responded, “Hello” back and waited for a reply. Within minutes, I got a reply from a scammer who was purportedly going to make me a lot of bitcoin. They didn’t waste any time trying to build a relationship first, just right into the scam.

Note: At this point, I decided I had lots of time to kill and I decided a good use of that time was to waste the scammer’s time by responding with nonsense and wasting his time. It probably isn’t professional of me to do this, and most people should not, because there is some small risk to doing so, but wasting a scammer’s time gives me great joy. My Holiday Inn-staying lawyers tell me to tell you not to do what I do. Also, don’t drink boiling fluids, don’t staple your fingers, or walk into traffic.

First, I wanted to confirm that I was dealing with a scammer, so I went to “his” profile. From here on out I’ll refer to the scammer as a “he”, even though “he” could be a female or group. It just makes writing these types of stories easier.

Here’s Osman Gauin’s (or is it James Mark’s?) Facebook profile (https://www.facebook.com/osman.gauin) shown below.

He’s a very handsome fellow. Apparently loves kids. Lives in Syria and moved there in 2021. That’s a strange time, during a brutal civil war, to move to Syria. What a brave soul! And so happy. No FB Friends though (as shown below).

That’s always a serious red flag.

No playing around, right from the start, Gauin, asked me if I have a Bitcoin wallet? Facebook appears to be telling me that Gauin’s account is a “New Facebook Account” with his post. That’s good. Too bad it’s not a little more obvious to help more people or plastered on his profile when people check.

So, time to begin scamming the scammer, to waste his time and see what his overall scam is.

He claims to be a Bitcoin minner (sic), see below. I guess any scam using the label bitcoin is supposed to seduce more victims?

As the scammer was replying, I decided to do a reverse image search on one of his handsome images using Google and Bing (see the image I used below for the reverse image search).

Scammer continues:

My reverse image search turns up who the images really belong to. I was amazed, because reverse image searches are oftentimes not successful at all, or take a lot of research to find the real owner of the images. But in this case, the first images returned from the search point to the real owner of the images.

Turns out the picture is famous Lebanese celebrity, Tony Baroud (shown below). Here’s the real Tony Baroud’s FB web page: https://www.facebook.com/tonybaroudpage.

Incidentally, I can also find all sorts of scams using Tony Baroud’s photos, especially romance scams. I get it. He’s handsome. It’s got to be so weird that scammers around the world are using your public pictures to scam other people.

The scam continues. The scammer wants to move me to WhatsApp, which I use, but I claim ignorance.

My wife suggests that I slip in the real name of the man’s who’s images were stolen. I love her and her suggestion, so I say, “Tony, are you there?” (see below) in reference to Tony Baroud. Now any real person would go, “I’m not Tony, I’m Osman (or Mark)”. Nope, the scammer simply replies, “Yes”, and carries on like nothing happened. I also misspell “mine” as “mind” to misspell the word miner, in honor of scammer’s minner misspelling earlier on. It’s my homage.

He apparently tries to send me a Google Hangout invite, but to what account I do not know because I have not given him my Gmail account…and either way his invitation is not appearing in my Google Hangouts screen anyway. He gives me his email address, [email protected] (see below).

His email address doesn’t match any of his previously used names, of course. Doesn’t everyone have two or three different names they use with their email and social media accounts?

I email him (see below) and change my name in the process. I figured if he could change names, why not me.

The scammer badly wants me to go to Google Hangouts (see below)…but will never tell me what address he is using.

I noticed that Facebook has automatically added this account as a Friend of mine even though I didn’t accept his request to be a Friend. I had to block this account because I didn’t want them to have access to my friends and other personal details. So, I blocked his account in Facebook, de-friended, and reported the account as a fraudulent account. Here’s how Facebook responded to my report of a guy using a pretend identity to scam people:

So, apparently using someone else’s photos, using fake names, and trying to scam people out of their money is not against Facebook’s Community Standards. Hmm. And Facebook has not de-friended him on my profile. This is a profound mistake on Facebook’s part. Do they care about protecting their customers or not?

Osman continued (see below).

Not sure why he wanted to know what type of bitcoin wallet I used, but my guess is they have different scams depending on how you reply. He eventually goes into his final pitch (see below). I send him money and get ten times as much in return. It’s that simple.

This, my friends, is what we call an “advanced fee scam”. You send me money and the scammer supposedly makes you much more money later on. Trust me. Sadly, this sort of bores me as I expected to be sent a bunch of links, asked to open documents, or to run some trojan horse malware program. This scam is way less sophisticated than that.

Here’s my reply (below). I sweeten up the amount I’m willing to send, hopefully to generate excitement that I can crush later on.

Osman replies (see below):

It’s that simple. I send him money and he makes me rich. I ask him how I should send him the money, cash or bitcoin? And I pretend to be giddy with excitement with the money I will be making. He replies (see below).

He continued, sending me his bitcoin wallet address:

So, I respond that I just sent $3K to the (wrong) bitcoin wallet. I “accidentally” dropped some digits. This will be fun.

To add to the scammer’s stress, I announce I’m going to bed now…so I’ve transferred the money to the wrong account and I’ll be sleeping now.

He notices my bitcoin wallet "mistake".

He asked me to send him a screenshot of the bitcoin transaction so he can troubleshoot. I send him another message ignoring his request but saying I sent some more money…again…to the wrong bitcoin wallet address. He’s going to love me.

Now, just because I’m growing too bored to play more, I send him one last message. This one is a link to this story. So, imagine if you will, what he’s thinking as he opens the link and sees my headline and this story. Hi Osman!