"Come join our swingers' party"

A friend of mine was scammed recently on a social networking site that's rather popular here, and he basically hooked up with a "gorgeous woman" (we can't really be too sure, can we?)   who chatted him up, and then "invited" him to an exclusive swingers' party in Singapore. He got curious, and she managed to convince him to check out a website where he was asked to "book" his intention in advance-- and he did; he forked out SGD 250 for a special invitation to the swingers' party that was supposed to take place on Christmas Eve, and they'd even sent him a address at the private suites of a certain six-star hotel.

And when he arrived, surprise, surprise, there wasn't any party, and subsequent attempts to contact the hottie who hooked up with him proved futile. He then asked me for my opinion if he could file a police report regarding the matter, and I told him that while he did have a case, would he want to risk the potentially embarrassing exposure in the local media, given how anything that proves to be a spicy sex scandal always seems to gather the attention of the newspapers?

I am, however, surprised that a relatively well-educated guy like him holding a senior management post at a global multi-national would fall for a simple scam like this. I mean, surely he'd know better than to give his credit card details to some unknown website, and god knows what other damage they could dish out with the information he'd voluntarily (and stupidly) given up during the "payment". 

I wouldn't be surprised if there were other dudes out there who fell for the scam. The modus operandi seemed simple enough: set up an account on some social networking site, put up fake photos of a gorgeous girl, bait guys to chat, and then make the invitation to a swinger's party that will never take place.

Look, you wanna have your fun, go out there and meet real people. Alright, so maybe there could be real swinger parties going around out there, but why would you have to make an online payment before you even met your "host/organiser" in real life?

The kind of things men do to get their taste of forbidden fruit. Tsk tsk.