Every interaction is scripted, from timezone changes (eg: going on "vacation") to family members who fall sick, to urgent requests to withdraw their investments from these scam exchanges, to appeals for "forgiveness" for not realizing they have scammed the victim. It's all a game to these folks.

1. I assumed I could align scammers by communicating the principles and beliefs that align me to open source, and linking them to the financial benefits this has brought me.

Open source skills have given me good revenue, the ability to recognize value, and the ability to build and run businesses. I've assumed this aligns with the scammer's ultimate desire to generate revenue.

2. I assumed that scammers would prefer a legitimate way of creating revenue, if it were offered

Scamming is hard, carries risks, and has low payoffs. In my view, coding is easy given good learning materials and mentorship, has low risks since you can easily find work under a boss, and has high payoff because you can easily eliminate the boss and start a company.

My assumptions are not realistic:

1. Scammers are motivated by the idea of victimizing others. It's not just a need to create revenue - it's a need to do it by hurting others.

2. Scammers see coding as the "harder alternative". I discount how difficult it is to learn to code, even with mentorship.

In the end, the only thing I succeed at is stringing them along. And this is ultimately because my rationale is so naive that they see me as a gullible target.

It has been very disheartening to realize that scammers interact with me only because my principles and theories make me seem like an easily exploited target.

But that's where I'm at, lol.

It might be best to quit while I'm ahead, so to speak. I'm probably lucky that I haven't run into someone skilled enough to find leverage that can extort me.

I could see it as a burnable source of labour, not as a means of pushing a values system though.

I hang out in Facebook groups where we talk about AI news and share our open source projects. I regularly get approached by people interested in learning about ai. I have developed a few mentorships and friendships that way.

Some people approach me requesting mentorship in coding for AI. Usually these people don't know python, git, or how to implement and test code. So we usually focus on those topics first. At the same time we read current papers in AI, discuss important trends and ideas, and set up small AI experiments. Eventually we make small contributions to open source projects, and maybe start a project solving a problem they care about.

For example, in one project we worked on fine tuning OpenAI's whisper model to adapt to the speaker's accent - this would help users with heavy accents enjoy the benefits of accurate speech recognition. In another project, we're building a DSL for authoring interactive fiction.

However, not everyone who approaches me is honest about their intentions. Of the 12 people I've mentored in the last year, 6 of them have attempted to involve me in something that was likely a scam. They've built rapport with me by learning and doing well in our conversations about AI. Then they've asked me for money, help with international purchases, help hiring mercenaries to find their brother's killer, or attempting to get me to accept money against my express wishes. They've tried to involve me in investment schemes, and other likely pretexts to scams.

I initially felt that it did not matter if these people were scammers, or tried to scam me. I could easily reject their attempts. The skills I was teaching were the important part, and I felt that once they had the skills, it would help them build a better life where they could use code for a living rather than scamming. It did not occur to me that a scammer would likely use coding skills to commit more crimes against innocents.

At this time I've given up on the program, because I don't think that I'm really helping the scammers, and there is a risk they might find a way to scam or extort me or someone in my network or communities. The projects we work on have often focused on helping people with disabilities and communication issues, and that weighs especially heavy on me. I started to consider the risk that by helping a scammer start an open source community serving vulnerable people, I would be giving them access to potential victims.

So at this time, I have stepped back from mentoring anyone who ever made any kind of unethical suggestion or pretext to a scam.

I am happy with my decision, because it's given me more energy to dedicate to bright students who really want to make a positive impact on the world of open source. I also spend a lot less time worrying that I might be enabling criminals.

TL;DR. Yes it's real. But I'm not saying it's a good idea!