Who else here has heard of the Military Romance Scams taking place on Facebook?

If you ever work on a general officer's personal staff, you'll find yourself innundated with thousands of these. I worked for a well-known general, and I found myself deleting hundreds of fake Facebook, Twitter, and Skype accounts every week, only to have more pop up.

The worst is when the victims of these scams start calling various US Army headquarters either wanting to know why General X isn't running away with them to get married or demanding that the US military pays them back for their troubles.

For some victims, the realization that they are in the middle of some sort of scam fills them with excitement, because they believe that they are an investigator in a world-wide manhunt against Nigerian Romance Scammers alongside the US military in some Zero Dark Thirty-style plot. I had one victim constantly call and email me. She just would not stop talking to these scammers because it gave her a legitimate excuse to talk to actual soldiers.

The worst part was when she "monologued" and told one of these scammers my real name. Sure enough, within a week, I had my very own Nigerian impersonator. I sent him a nasty letter and said I had a drone overhead, and never saw another scammer.

Some of us have the courage to decline 100 daily marriage proposals and at least that many free bottles of Viagra from fictitious females somewhere in Siberia. I think her name was Spam.

Its unfortunate that people fall for these things. I had a guy attempt to scam me on a E-bay auction once where I lost the auction. I got an e-mail from a guy who claimed he was the original seller and that he was offering me the item as a second chance bid that E-bay expressly prohibits. At first glance it appeared legit until he started giving me info that made no sense what so ever. He wanted money to wired to Romania and a friend in Chicago would send the item. The original seller was in Utah. Obviously that was when I knew it was a setup. But I researched his handle and was surprised on an E-bay web forum for fraud how many people actually sent the guy money in previous scams.

I know this is not the same issue, but I can see how people can be duped especially in countries where they may be new to the internet.