Can't Stand Me Now...

Well brothers and sisters, I've been offline for a while. For all 200 of you, I apologise but life has been rather crappy.

One, a relative was diagnosed as being rather ill, and I had to make sure no bad stuff happened.
Two, I found out a girl I was e-mailing online was a scammer, and was a tad depressed.
Three, I actually work in hell and consequently there were few places I could go to escape from the general misery that is my life.

But fuck it, says I, I'm a survivor and get through this shit (at least this time). I guess I'm doing this blog article out of the same spirit of heroes of mine like John Keats, Kurt Cobain, Robert Burns... Confessional, despressing, but true.

The illness of my relative, you'll have to excuse me, but there isn't a lot I can say. I'll just say that life sucks for such a long period of time, sometimes it's a blessing when the inevitable diagnosis happens and you know what the fuck is going on.

The girl... Isn't there a girl in every story? There's been several in mines, and usually not in a good way. When they are, I usually screw it up one way or another.

I'm on one of these dating sites and this Russian Girl called Nadya e-mailed me. I replied, and it was pretty cool, for a while. She sent LOADS of photographs. In fact, fuck it, say hello Nadya:
Nadya claimed to be 23. Nadya claimed to be from Kazan in Russia.

One day, after a few e-mails in which we talked trash (i do this, you do that, he does this, daddy is a soldier...) she said her mother said she loves me. This was after about five / six e-mails.
Now, call me cynical, but my spidey-sense was tingling. But I ignored it. I went with it because she was pretty. Honestly, stupid thing to do. Waste of my and the scammers time. Does that make me complete bastard? Probably. If she'd been less than what she was my spidey sense would've prevailed and scammer would've been over the hills and far away quicker than it takes a professional footballer to gravitate towards something blonde and hairy.

And so, your humble narrator continued to speak with Nadya over the coming weeks. He sent her pictures and grew more and more excited about the prospect of her.

The photo's, which continued all the time, were extremely convincing. They'd be digital numbers which had dates and times on them. The voice in the back of my head would say; "Who takes those bloody pictures?" But my libido prevailed and I ignored it, for a time.

By the end she started talking about how all her friends though she was onto a good thing, and how life was all hunky dory, and... and then I googled her name.

Imagine what it's like, you're drunk, lonely and happy on a Friday night, your relative is ill, and you need something to make life that little bit more bearable. And then the girl you think is for you comes up on this:

It is shite. Completely. Bad bad bad bad bad. I was more disgusted with the fact I fell for it, rather than what I said to her. If she was real I meant it, and I'm not ashamed of that.

The scammer, as you'll see when you click the link is some dude called Oleg. I toyed briefly with sending rubbish back and scamming him back, but in the end I sent the webpage URL with a brief: "What is this?" and have heard nothing since.

But a slight tinge of guilt remained upon me, and it wasn't based on any facts or knowledge. The girl in the pictures, is allegedly some poor girl called Tatyana Solovova who is "innocent". (whatever that means).

If she is just getting paid to be a scammers identity, then several things occurred to me. One was in relation to a Channel 4 movie called "Sex Traffic" where these Eastern European girls end up as prostitutes. What happens to Tatyana Solovova when no-one believes her scam anymore? If she really is from a poor family, then does the mafioso behind it sell her on to the highest bidder? Or just anyone who manages to call Oleg?

Did my e-mail make Oleg realise it wasn't going to work any more? Because on checking, that wasn't the only website. There were these ones:

http://www.womenrussia.com/blackpage389.htm#vladimirovna
http://www.stop-scammers.com/scammer.asp?profile=942

I'm not even sure if I'm just being paranoid. I have no idea.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met --or never parted -- we had ne'er been broken-hearted. - Robert Burns

Fuck it. So be it.