inkeedgriffin SCAMMER

Friday 27 April 2018

Two for the price of one today.  Here is another to watch out for

Well what do I know about this guy? Here goes

• His name is James Josh Griffin, age 46 but has told someone else he is 36
• He is a Sergeant in the US Army, 173rd battalion, posted in Afghanistan
• He is widowed and his wife died from breast cancer
• He has a son who he claimed at first was 8 and then later told me was 17!!
• He is from Newhaven Connecticut, USA

My first instincts told me he was a scammer but this one turned out not to be for money or iTunes cards.    Quite quickly he wanted to move the conversation off Instagram and onto Kik but we ended up chatting on hangouts instead.  He would post long, rambling messages that did not always make complete grammatical sense and were typed so quickly (too quickly) that they must have been cut and pasted into the conversation. This happened a lot with this guy and always looks dodgy to me like they are working from a script. This guy would also come onto Instagram or hangouts and say hello and then disappear for a long time, could be hours, could be days.  I think they do this to keep you interested but more likely to make you think they really are in a war zone with a really shaky and unpredictable internet connection.  Eventually he brought the conversation around to sex and he wanted me to share, as he described them, sexy pics.  When I said I wouldn't he asked for nudes instead. I said no and that was it, no more communication from him. What a pity.  Images he sent me are below.

Here my instincts kicked in quite quickly.  I couldn't find his images he sent me elsewhere as someone else's.  But it was quite obvious he was tattooed so I asked him about the significance of what he had chosen and why he had chosen it.  He really did not give a great answer - it was clear that he had no real idea and was just looking at the pictures. The way he wrote just didn't sound like an American would and there were times where it just didn't make sense and it felt like the words were lost in translation - probably Google translate!! I also researched the 173rd battalion in the US Army. It does exist but is a support battalion based in Germany, certainly not currently in Afghanistan.  If you are at all in doubt and you are given a hard fact about the scammer, use Google to your advantage and do your research like I did.