AT ONE STAGE or another, we’ve all received a weird message from someone with no mutual friends who is claiming to be a 50-year-old American man on Instagram.
The usual response is to block, report or simply ignore. However, Alison Spittle decided to see if she could knock a bit of craic out of an American man named Jake who was trying to scam her on Instagram.
From the comfort of Dublin Bus, she began her 19-hour-long campaign.
Introducing Jake.
Jake is a policeman, or at least claims to be. His profile consisted entirely of photographs of his dog and photos of American flags.
First, Alison offered him everything that a Instagram scammer could want, upfront.
Jake then asked if they could move the conversation to Whatsapp, Gmail or Facebook.
Alison told him that Mark Zuckerberg and ‘Mr. Google’ are her ex boyfriends, so she doesn’t feel comfortable using their platforms to chat online. As the conversation progressed, Alison considered what the most outrageous request she could possibly make would be.
She eventually decided on asking Jake to delete every photo of his dog from his Instagram account, and in their place, upload photoshopped pictures that contained her face.
Any regular person would probably tell her to f**k off, but Jake decided to grant her wish. Why? Well, because he had an ulterior motive, which you will find out about pretty soon.
The man agreed, and even uploaded a photograph of a fry that she accidentally sent to him.
When Alison realised that Jake would basically upload anything she told him to upload, she called on her followers for submissions and ideas.
One of the submissions was a plate of salmon and brown bread.
As expected, Jake uploaded it to his profile. He also changed his profile picture to a photograph of the Sugar Puffs monster.
At this point, comedian Davey Reilly decided to grab some of that free advertising space on Jake’s profile and requested a plug.
Sure enough, Alison got it up there, alongside everyone else’s requests.
This carried on all afternoon, until eventually Jake popped the question. No, he did not propose to Alison Spittle – he asked her to send him an iTunes giftcard to ‘update his apps’. Fairly sure that’s not how you update your apps, but anyways…
Like every scammer since the dawn of time, Jake promised that he had plenty of money in his bank account to pay her back later.
Eventually, Alison decided to send him a photograph of an iTunes card from Google.
He wasn’t able to see the numbers on that card, so she attempted to bring the conversation to a close with this iTunes Card she prepared at home.
Well, that’s one way to entertain yourself on a Friday afternoon.
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