In other breaking news, Mobutu Sese Seko's widow has $33,000,000 to split with you if you just prove your trustworthiness by depositing a cashier's check and sending her the cash.

@DAVID

Send me the address and I'll be right on it, immediately after I finish wiring emergency money to a long-lost high school friend who I haven't heard from in 30 years until this morning when he sent me an email explaining he is stuck at the airport in Lagos! He had his bags and passport stolen! Can you imagine how scared he is?

I assume Paul Goodman is the guy to turn to when Leonard "J." Crabs is unavailable.

@1, make sure you send her the cash BEFORE the check clears!

As far as the letter, is it even illegal to flirt with a minor over the internet?

Listen to Dan and relax, LW. When online in the future, chat then meet then flirt.

Heh, I wonder if this scam is even *decades* old and pre-dates the Internet? Agatha Christie wrote about a similar scam as a short story in The Labors of Hercules - a mother and her pretty daughter befriend a single man at a vacation resort, then extort money from him under the pretense of hushing up a scandal that could damage his career.

On a side note, for the last year or so, I've been getting phone calls on and off from the IRS and a couple of other government agencies, saying I owe several hundred dollars in fines and that there's a warrant out for my arrest if I don't pay up immediately. Interestingly enough, the warrant is in my business name, not my legal name. One gentleman who called got mad and yelled at me that he was sending the cops to arrest me when, instead of offering him money, I asked him why he wasn't using the name on my tax returns, and informed him that impersonating a government entity is a crime and I could report him.

Even more amazing, who knew the IRS hired so many foreign workers? Every single person who has called me about this spoke in heavily accented English. How progressive they are!

@Sandial: It is illegal to send sexually explicit/indecent material to a minor, over the internet or otherwise. What exactly constitutes explicit/indecent is going to be a matter of opinion first of the DA then of the jury, but...

...as with any criminal offense, conviction requires criminal intent. If there was no reason to suspect the person was a minor, no intent, almost certainly no charges and no conviction.

None-the-less, don't send explicit material to someone you've never met.

IANAL, for the record.

I've long wondered if Nigerian scammers would be more be more successful if they paired up with out-of-work American English majors and buffed their syntax. So I'm intrigued by the theory that the Nigerians scammers don't have horrible English by accident, but rather on purpose.

Since it takes time to groom a prospect before making the ask and the most successful scams get repeated cash advances for various contrived expenses, they want to screen for clueless people. People who don't cue in on the non-American-style English fit the bill. "This is your esteemed nephew, presently alone and destitute in Lagos after . . . . "

Back to the LW's situation: Is it a better scam if the flirty person on OKC emails as an adult would, something a little borderline, or wholly teeny-bopper in vocabulary and grammar? While some guys would hopefully drop the apparently under-age girl, others wouldn't. Then, when "Dad" calls, more of the pieces click into an imagined "Oh shit, I've arranged a hook-up with a minor!"

At this point, Reverse Google Image Search is your friend.

@9: Seriously, I bet those are common "hot girl" shots anyone could find, I'd wonder what was up pretty quickly if someone flirted online but never wanted to meet up.

"None-the-less, don't send explicit material to someone you've never met."

Lotsa people gonna be in trouble if Dan is a 13 year old girl or boy.

LW- rest assured, this isn't your case. It should still be noted that some bored policemen in Iowa or Idaho or even Tacoma may get into dating sites and attempt to lure men into sex, online or otherwise, while pretending to be an underage girl or boy.
A friend of mine got arrested for such chat, and I suspect at least one response I had couple of years ago may have possibly been a set up. (I pointed to the age difference and told the young person of interest that ID’s are going to be exchanged if and when we meet. That was the end of our chat.)
The brave policemen have special fondness to gay men and trans women since we are worthless anyway, born-male who gave up their manly rights only to become fucking machines that should be locked behind bars in the first place.

Internet engagement rules I learned here a while ago and still follow include no sexy pics or even phone numbers till we meet in person, meeting for the first time in a public place before 7 pm, exchange id’s if and when.

Thanks, Biggie.

"I played along because, well, I'm who I am, which is a 24-year-old male who's willing to just go along with things as long as it's interesting and not directly illegal or harmful (which I'm thinking is a policy I should reconsider)."

"Played along"? So if this were a real woman, you'd have only been "playing" with her, not genuinely interested? (Or is that revisionist history? Hmm)

"a woman on OKC who wants to go see a movie and then makes sexual comments!?"

Uh, how is that "too good to be true"? That happens all the time. That's what dating sites are for. Okay, AWT feels stupid because it was in fact a scam by either a teenager posing as an adult on OKCupid (which I've encountered, too) or extortionists, but believing that there's a woman on a dating site who wants to date you isn't stupid.

Agree with the "don't get naughty until you meet/speak in person" advice. Though that's a rule I've broken... hmm, now I feel a bit stupid.

I'm inclined to give the LW a break. This did turn out to be a scam, but it wasn't an obvious scam, and in the heat of the moment, he did do the right thing which was to hang up the phone. Now he (and we) know. Good information.

@12: "The brave policemen have special fondness to gay men and trans women since we are worthless anyway"

Sure, some are garden-variety bigots, but lots of them are tortured closet cases and pursuing others satisfies their self-hatred, arouses them, and they actually think "I can't be gay - I arrest gays" is good cover and not a screaming red flag. WTF volunteers for that assignment or champions starting such a program but a closet case?

@12 I'm curious - is there some special lure for trans women? #Asking4AFriend #ACop

Sportlandia @ 17
Nothing specific, just someone pretending to be fairly young, below the minimum age I stated in a kinky sex ad.
And now a question for you if I may… Few months ago, during the discussion about a Jewish woman who wants her German bf to play “Nazi,” you made a sarcastic comment that made it look like you’re saying the Holocaust never happened.
Care to clarify?

Oh, the arrested person was a straight man in his 30's, the teenage girl was a policeman.

The english in the letter is so bad I assume the LW is running some sort of scam themselves.

At least 2 male friends of mine have asked me for advice on this exact same situation in the past year... talked to a woman on okcupid who said suggestive things and even sent nude or semi nude photos (reverse google image search later proved them to be from porn sites) before "daddy" gets involved. In one of the cases the fake "dad" demanded money or else he'd involve the police. My guess is that LW's situation would have escalated towards the money ask if he'd stayed on the phone.

A quarter point to Ms Jina for recalling the Stymphalian birds.

@6 Yes, this is an ancient scam, with several common twists. "Daughter and Dad" and "Wife and Husband" are the most common pairings, with money or marriage or national secrets as the perpetrator's desired payoff.

My favorite instance of it in pop culture is the song "It's a scandal, It's an outrage" from the musical Oklahoma.

I feel like this guy has a long way to grow up if he thinks that any girl who sends pics and talks seductively about a perspective date is coming on too strong that she must be fake? Lol, zip up the big boy pants, dude!

Hard to resist the Siren call of lewd text/photos? Just remember, the Internet is forever. Anything you post always has the chance of turning up somewhere else later, and odds are, it won't be somewhere you want it to be. It will be in an anonymous text to your priest (or in an anonymous text from your priest.) Caveat emptor. Think twice about sending/posting anything you wouldn't want your grandmother to see. Not saying don't ever do it, just saying, think twice. Then be prepared to live with the consequences of your actions. "Consequences" seems to be a concept my daughter, and her whole circle of friends (I won't say "her generation" as I don't want to use that broad of a brush) has a hard time grasping.

...and if your grandmother was a one-eyed, one-toothed hooker who specialized in Boston Steamers, feel free to use a different analogy...

@25 This is such a weird comment because he's almost certainly correct and I think the consensus is that sending racy pics before you ever meet someone is a gigantic red flag.

OkC attracts many scammers, but on the bright side, most scammers aren't investing much time creating credible fake profiles, so spotting these users isn't hard. Most fake profiles amount to one photo, five innocuous lifestyle questions answered, and a short self-summary which doesn't provide much color on the person. Fake users will try to entice you through a sexy photo and a "like" or a message that basically reads "Hi." A scammer isn't going to spend 10 hours answering 300 questions or writing an interesting profile.

Also, most real users provide enough information about themselves that you can identify them through GIS and some amount of Goggling. In any event, after an exchange of e-mail and a call, you should have found out enough about them to do some background check.

@7: ...as with any criminal offense, conviction requires criminal intent. If there was no reason to suspect the person was a minor, no intent, almost certainly no charges and no conviction.

I am a lawyer, and reading your comment had me shrieking "NOOOOOOOO!"

There's this thing called strict liability. It means exactly what it sounds like: you're in trouble regardless of whether you knew or not. Statutory rape is a prime example. Even if you had no idea that person you fucked was underage--heck, even if you had good cause to think otherwise, such as person being in a bar that's exclusively 21 and up, she told you she was 22--it doesn't matter. You're still in trouble if the person is underage, regardless of whether you knew.

Why? Overreacting politicians catering to overreacting parents, "Think of the children!", etc.

And people say we don't need men's rights activism. IMO, the lack of mens rea on crimes like this is one of the prime examples of why we do.

Sportlandia @28: She didn't send "racy pics." "She" sent the same pictures that she had on her profile, and "made some suggestive comments."
I've done that. With people I hadn't met yet, but with whom I'd hit it off particularly well. I've cybered with someone from OKC before I'd met them. It happens.
The re-use of the same photos was the red flag... in retrospect. If a real person was asked for additional pics of themselves, they would have these to hand. Sure, they may be less flattering than the profile ones, but most of us have dozens of photos of us kicking about. A scammer would not.

@31 I would absolutely never, ever, EVER "cyber" or anything like that with someone i'd never met. That'd be like sticking your dick in a gloryhole without a condom.