The best Instagram Scammers I've ever seen
I really want to meet The Twins 87
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Hello Sternal Journalists!
If you didn’t read last week’s SternJourn about my adventures in under-researched half-marathoning, it has been hailed by at least two trusted Sternal Journalists as their favorite ever and received kind words from others. Perchance give it a read!
This week, we descend out of the hills and back to a place I spend way more time: Instagram. I think a lot about Instagram because I am on Instagram a lot. If there were an Anon group for Instagram addiction, I would seriously consider attending.1
I think a lot about how—and I don’t think I’m the first to say this—the internet is a place. We talk about it and its subsidiaries (social media, email, apps, etc.) as an activity (scrolling). But when I’m scrolling, I’m not present in the space I’m physically inhabiting. I’m spending time in this other place or other places: the internet, instagram, chess.com, spotify.
But we never—or I never—take the time to really question what sort of place this is I’m spending all my time. In the real world, we know that there are places we’re supposed to go and places we’re not supposed to go; places we want to go and places we have to go; places that make us feel good now and places that used to make us feel good but not make us feel bad.
I know all that intuitively about many of the places that I go, but the ability to dip into and out of your phone makes this fuzzy barrier where it’s a little more slippery to define the place of the internet and its sub-places. Here, however, is my best attempt:
I think the internet, and Instagram specifically, is like a bar and a park and a bus. It is specifically a gathering place, but a pretty ineffective one. It’s like we’re all at the same airport that is also a museum, and it’s where we planned to meet everyone we’ve ever known but at no specific time, and have reason to believe we will see a celebrity and overhear some wild conversations.
It’s a place packed with people and exactly the people you think you’ll meet which is (you think) all people.
So it’s also devastatingly unsurprising and deep-boring. By that, I don’t mean deeply boring, but rather there’s so much exciting stuff on the surface, but it’s rare to have any sort of deep experience in the place of Instagram.
Quick aside: when I was in college, Omegle was all the rage. If you don’t know what it is, Omegle is a website that randomly pairs you with random folks from around the world to chat with. You can stay for as long or as short as you like before moving on to the next chat. I believe there’s not a video component of it, but in the late aughts, that was only for ChatRoulette. Omegle was text-only. You normally had to click through a few conversations to find someone who wasn’t asking your a/s/l in service of some surely meaningful sextual contact.
But when you did find a platonic chat, you could have some fun conversations. I know that I had quite a few fun Omegle chats while pulling all-nighters in the basement of Emory’s library. I don’t really remember any of them.
The only one I remember was a couple hours long with another student who said they were in China, and about halfway through the conversation came out to me as gay. They said they hadn’t told anyone, as their friends and family were conservative and would certainly disown them.
I was in a 3am Monster-energy-drink-induced haze and was also absolutely buzzing from showering my anonymous Omegle friends with platitudes about how he shouldn’t be ashamed and his friends and family were the problem. He expressed that he had heard the U.S. could be more tolerant (lol—but maybe?!) and a desire to go places that he felt would let him be more himself.
We chatted about music and movies and the school assignments we were putting off. The usual stuff people chat about when they get the depth out of the way. And then eventually, I said I had to go. It was late and I actually did have to complete whatever work I was completing—probably some one-act play that clunkily-if-not-disastrously tried to map socioeconomic struggles over a beer-pong game.
“Wait,” he said.2 “Can we keep talking off Omegle? I haven’t told anyone any of that before, and it would be nice to keep talking to you.”
I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I declined. I was in theory happy to keep up the friendship, and giving someone from Omegle your Facebook was probably no worse than all the times I gave out my screen name in the Alias or Animorphs AIM chatrooms. But I think, after getting so real over Omegle, the request to bring our conversation into a less dark corner of the internet forced me to consider the fact that maybe it hadn’t been real at all.
It was possible that this person I was talking to on Omegle was not exactly who they said they were. Nuh-duh, Julian. But whether they were or not, taking it out of the sanctity of the self-contained-anonymous-mostly-for-sex-but-not-today Omegle context kinda ruined the magic.
Still, I think about him every now and then. If everything he said was true, I do feel a little guilt that I didn’t extend my friendship into the real-er world; and I hope that he’s well.
Okay, oops, that was a long aside. But it felt relevant because it is one of the few times I feel like I’ve connected with someone in a deep and unexpected way on the internet.
One of the other few times was a couple weeks ago when I got this message in my Instagram spam inbox:
Now, I don’t want to make light of refugee crises. They are very bad. Even though I feel beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is a scam, they are basing their scam on real plights of real people. That is not lost on me.
But putting that aside, I fucking love the pictures that these scammers, who I will henceforth refer to as The Twins87, chose for their fake account that is theoretically meant to instill elicit an overwhelming amount of sympathy from their mark (in this case, me).
Here is the first one on their profile. You might think it similar to their profile avatar:
It is. So is this one:
And this one:
And this one where you realize they somehow have only started smoldering:
The Twins87 pictured in these incredible selfies that ride the razor’s edge I never knew existed between stoicism and playfulness are more than likely not the scammers. But they are two guys who love taking this type of picture together.
I mean, they love taking this type of picture:
None of those are repeats, but feel free to check. Romantic or platonic, siblings or best friends, I don’t know any two people who have such a deep catalog of almost the same exact picture.
And I have not stopped thinking about them. In the humdrum bar-museum-airport of Instagram where I thought I had seen it all and knew all there was to see, The Twins87 showed up at my door—bearded one in front, flock-of-seagulls guy over his shoulder—and just turned all of my expectations upside down.
Because with my Omegle friend, I had a rich experience that I didn’t want to take any further on the chance that it might all be a scam. With The Twins87, I’m so sure it’s a scam. And I don’t have the money to help them. But on the off chance these guys actually exist? I mean… they clearly don't. But what if they do?
I won’t! I shouldn’t!
But if TheTwins 87, the most earnest selfie-takers to have ever walked the earth, actually exist? Don’t we want to know that?!
I don’t know, I guess this is what Instagram addiction looks like.
Recommendations
Moro Rock. Place. It’s like 5 hours from LA and VERY COOL.
Soul Khan vs. A Ward. Rap Battle. There was a NYTimes article this week about how battle rap is coming back, but if you’re gonna read that, it’s probably better to watch the battle they linked than read about it.
Who is Matty Healy?. Article. I don’t know much about The 1975, but started hearing about them a lot from their recent album, and then a lot a lot because of people arguing over whether the frontman’s controversy was controversy. And when I don’t know much about something, then hear about it, it is always best that Jia Tolentino writes a feature explaining it. And she did just that!
SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS. Song. Killer Mike with Future aaand Andre 3000 guest verses??? I cannot wait to listen to the rest of this album.
Alrighty, that’s all!
Sending love!
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.
Update: it appears that there is such a group! And I will actually further seriously consider attending once I’ve done a little more due diligence to confirm this is not a Scientology recruiting channel (Wish that was a joke, but LA is weird!).
I’m paraphrasing from memory, but it’s the gist of what he said.
If your Omegle friend was just trying to get information for scamming purposes, then that is a truly nefarious and brilliant scheme. A little surprised you didn't fall for it. Good for you!