> Then Kunz started noticing strange things. She seemed to forget subjects they’d already discussed – a recipe for overnight oats, a picture of her own cats. He started asking questions.
I know a developer who wrote the software for an SMS call center about 2 decades ago - it would keep a log of all texts sent, so any agent could pretend to be any of the completely fake profiles of women looking for a relationship.
At 1-2€ per SMS, this was a quite profitable business for the call center, the dev and the telcos, who took about 50% and had no interest in shutting this down.
“We had a really close relationship,” he told Reuters. “I trusted her.” He even tattooed her birthdate over his heart – “at least what I believe is her birthdate.”
I’m having a hard time forming an opinion on this. Yeah I guess he kinda got scammed, and it’s definitely exploiting lonely people, but also… trying to establish a relationship with a porn star? Getting a tattoo of her birthday?
Guy has an insanely serious lack of self control. Like a degenerate gambler.
Not quite "been there, done that", but anecdotally being lonely/alone accelerates and reinforces any "mental illness"-ish behavior. "Eating your own dogfood" type of thing, but in a bad way - it's a positive feedback loop, probably with combination of feeling guilt, inferior, being ashamed, not wanting to admit you messed up, and so on.
What I'm saying is - could be you, or me, or anyone else really. If the psyop is good enough and there isn't an external support structure to provide a "reality check", it's actually fairly easy to fall into this rabbit hole.
Exactly. Most countries try to protect their citizens from stuff like the most harmful of drugs, gambling and fraud. Should be easy to find out what's right.
OnlyFans gets multiple billions of revenue, which only represent 20%. So customers on OF, a single platform, easily spend tens of billions.
Companies like OnlyFans that exploit people's loneliness and vulnerability should not exist. There needs to be a ban on these virtual narcotics just as there is on real ones.
This company gives nothing back to society except misery and addiction.
Sex work is called the oldest profession for a reason.
There are some basic human urges you can't suppress by banning them - religions have tried for a few thousand years, and they can't keep even their _priests_ in check, never mind the regular believers.
In Sweden, the ban is on men (or anyone, but almost only men in practice) looking for paid sexual encounters. As a woman (or man), you're free to sell sex. But if you pay someone for sex, you're committing an offence and can get jail time. The implicit assumption is that only someone in a very vulnerable position would sell their bodies (or worse, be forced into doing that by very bad people), and hence they don't deserve punishment, they just need help to get into a better situation.
This solution basically means law-abiding citizens who suffer from mental or physical conditions that make it virtually impossible to find a voluntary, willing sex partner are going to be cut off from being able to enjoy sexual pleasures for their whole lives. I suppose that this (and the fact of knowing this) may cause their condition to worsen significantly.
In practice, those who can just go to Germany or the Netherlands to use a legal prostitute, or Thailand (for example) if they want a long term partner.
Those who can't are left to their own devices. Unfortunately, comparing figures about sexual crime between countries is notoriously difficult, so it's not possible to make a clearcut case for whether that impacts , but it's not hard to imagine there may be a correlation.
Anyway, I wonder how the Swedish system sees Onlyfans. Does it consider the men who are buying these services from the "vulnerable models" the bad guys in this story? Should they be punished? Do they believe only vulnerable women are on Onlyfans, and that most of them probably were forced into it by some bad men? I honestly want to know what they are thinking.
Onlyfans is not sex work, it is infinitely more sinister. Most "models" there sell facades of human contact to the extremely deprived who have nowhere else to go to. It is adjacent to drug sellers selling to homeless street beggars and turning them into perpetual miserable cash cows.
But there isn't a ban on all real narcotics, alcohol is freely available in many places, so why ban this virtual narcotic vs any other (gaming, social media, fantasy forums?)
Alcohol was a tool for social gatherings long before its narcotic tendencies came to be established. For better or worse it has been a part of generations of human societal growth. Unlike alcohol, other narcotics like gaming, social media, fantasy forums, cocaine, methamphetamines etc don't bring people together, instead push them away and latch on as parasites making it their hosts only goal to obtain more of themselves.
Unfortunately, you could say this about all pornography, really. I know that's singing to the choir if you're a religious fundamentalist but many adults consume pornography knowing it's a fiction and not letting themselves be deluded into thinking it's real.
Deep down, all vices that involve overuse occur when one is extremely lonely though. The only real issue with pornography is that it is mixed with other emotions / needs that can lead one to feeling much more hurt when the come-down occurs.
I used to run a social media management firm where we catered to real estate agents. For 12 dollar an hour, me and my partner would manage personal facebook and instagram accounts of realtors and small business owners but mostly realtors. We would pretend to be them, interact with people, add new friends and maintain a CRM of influential facebook acquitances they had. We had better virtual relationship with complete strangers then our realtors had in real life. To us it was the same. We pretended to be charasmatic and took risks in social communications that we wouldn't in real life. People trusted the person they thought they were talking to and recommended them as a realtor to their friends. We journaled their birthdays, anniversary and any significant thing in the CRM.
It was a win, win and win.
But at the end of the day real estate market crashed and we had an incredibly hard time to convince new clients that these business model actually works.
We used a real estate agency focused CRM but it is just too niche and might expose my client. On the more popular end, I used hubspot, and a little bit salesforce. The main thing was any CRM that provided reminders. So, I often used Google Sheets and airtable and calendar events. Tried to convince the clients to use Monica or Nat for personal crm but they prefered Google Sheets.
Intelligence may help a little bit to avoid addiction and falling into bad behaviours but it's no guarantee. And once captured, its even less help.
These platforms are designed for maximum effectiveness to empty our wallets, our brains and our souls. I wish this man all the best for recognising the bad. May we all change.
We still protect stupid people from harm all the time, lots of fraud is based on stupidity of their victims. The sophistication of the deception doesn't really matter, does it?
A couple of years ago the New Yorker (I believe) had a story about an accomplished university professor that fell for a romance scam that financially ruined him.
There might be just a couple of different forms of intelligence but there are plenty ways to be stupid and one does not preclude the other.
EDIT: I tried to find the article, but apparently so many accomplished university professors fall for romance scams that it is hopeless.
You cannot convince me that the proliferation of sex work is a net positive for humanity.
Perpetuating the idea that all that women have to do is "be sexy", the downright exploitation of lonely guys, probably isolating them even more and turning them into bigger outcasts (née creeps), fuelling the short term reward frenzy in both sides, and let's not even open the can of worms that is the drugs that are behind everything.
What a great piece of reporting. Impressive to find so many people willing to talk: Porn stars, agencies, chatters, victims – and all acknowledge the fraud. The victims even open their chats, knowing how shameful this can be.
And then Kunz, who had already investigated by himself and even became a chatter. What an incredible story really.
It's great even though I know all of the "revelation" about porn stars not actually chatting with the customers.
Ashley Maddison had the same issue. It seems if you hide one side of the interaction from the other, and one side benefits from scale, fraud is guaranteed to happen. Even robots do it, see the movie Her.
Readit News
I know a developer who wrote the software for an SMS call center about 2 decades ago - it would keep a log of all texts sent, so any agent could pretend to be any of the completely fake profiles of women looking for a relationship.
At 1-2€ per SMS, this was a quite profitable business for the call center, the dev and the telcos, who took about 50% and had no interest in shutting this down.
[1] New York Times: A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled – https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...
I’m having a hard time forming an opinion on this. Yeah I guess he kinda got scammed, and it’s definitely exploiting lonely people, but also… trying to establish a relationship with a porn star? Getting a tattoo of her birthday?
Guy has an insanely serious lack of self control. Like a degenerate gambler.
>lack of self control
Not quite "been there, done that", but anecdotally being lonely/alone accelerates and reinforces any "mental illness"-ish behavior. "Eating your own dogfood" type of thing, but in a bad way - it's a positive feedback loop, probably with combination of feeling guilt, inferior, being ashamed, not wanting to admit you messed up, and so on.
What I'm saying is - could be you, or me, or anyone else really. If the psyop is good enough and there isn't an external support structure to provide a "reality check", it's actually fairly easy to fall into this rabbit hole.
Exactly. Most countries try to protect their citizens from stuff like the most harmful of drugs, gambling and fraud. Should be easy to find out what's right.
OnlyFans gets multiple billions of revenue, which only represent 20%. So customers on OF, a single platform, easily spend tens of billions.
Don't regulate: get Fraud industry + OnlyFans
Regulate: only get OnlyFans.
This company gives nothing back to society except misery and addiction.
There are some basic human urges you can't suppress by banning them - religions have tried for a few thousand years, and they can't keep even their _priests_ in check, never mind the regular believers.
Should sex work be regulated? Definitely.
Can it be banned? No.
This solution basically means law-abiding citizens who suffer from mental or physical conditions that make it virtually impossible to find a voluntary, willing sex partner are going to be cut off from being able to enjoy sexual pleasures for their whole lives. I suppose that this (and the fact of knowing this) may cause their condition to worsen significantly.
In practice, those who can just go to Germany or the Netherlands to use a legal prostitute, or Thailand (for example) if they want a long term partner.
Those who can't are left to their own devices. Unfortunately, comparing figures about sexual crime between countries is notoriously difficult, so it's not possible to make a clearcut case for whether that impacts , but it's not hard to imagine there may be a correlation.
Anyway, I wonder how the Swedish system sees Onlyfans. Does it consider the men who are buying these services from the "vulnerable models" the bad guys in this story? Should they be punished? Do they believe only vulnerable women are on Onlyfans, and that most of them probably were forced into it by some bad men? I honestly want to know what they are thinking.
2) In any case it's the creators doing the cheating. Should malls be banned if one store happens to sell counterfeited handbags?
Deep down, all vices that involve overuse occur when one is extremely lonely though. The only real issue with pornography is that it is mixed with other emotions / needs that can lead one to feeling much more hurt when the come-down occurs.
Abating loneliness is what religion used to do best; I acknowledge this despite being atheist. Unfortunately it has become demonized in today's world.
It was a win, win and win.
But at the end of the day real estate market crashed and we had an incredibly hard time to convince new clients that these business model actually works.
Help Patrick spot a contradiction!
These platforms are designed for maximum effectiveness to empty our wallets, our brains and our souls. I wish this man all the best for recognising the bad. May we all change.
There might be just a couple of different forms of intelligence but there are plenty ways to be stupid and one does not preclude the other.
EDIT: I tried to find the article, but apparently so many accomplished university professors fall for romance scams that it is hopeless.
EDIT: Found it. Wasn't in The New Yorker, but The New York Times Magazinehttps://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-th...
Because he clearly is a victim.
In the GFE-MMO, the only way you win is not to play.
Perpetuating the idea that all that women have to do is "be sexy", the downright exploitation of lonely guys, probably isolating them even more and turning them into bigger outcasts (née creeps), fuelling the short term reward frenzy in both sides, and let's not even open the can of worms that is the drugs that are behind everything.
And then Kunz, who had already investigated by himself and even became a chatter. What an incredible story really.
It's great even though I know all of the "revelation" about porn stars not actually chatting with the customers.
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