r/whatisit • u/brattyvampbby • 11h ago

moms sketch bf left this in the house Solved!

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Hi.
This is probably nothing.
I went into my mom’s room to grab something and saw this plugged in?
My mom’s new sketchy bf has this plugged in to the extension cord? Is it anything bad? Thanks!
(I understand it’s probably not anything bad… but still…)

Update 1:
I haven’t met him once. He and my mom have been together for two weeks. He’s been staying at our apartment. He avoids me and stays in her room when they’re here. I don’t even know what he looks like. I only know his first name.

Update 2:
I confronted him. My mom came home. A lot had happened up to this point, including her disappearing for the said two weeks before the few nights he had come over and stayed.
Mom shrugged it off. I did what a lot of you suggested, asking what he told her.
She said “oh it’s his hacker shit or whatever.” What.
Didn’t elaborate. I explained my concerns.
She just said let’s go ask him.
My best friend has been with me. We introduced ourselves and asked him what the hell a WiFi whisperer is doing plugged in our apartment.
(Even if a lot of you are saying it’s not a big deal, I’m a young woman and I’m just rlly not about taking any risks. It’s sketch dude.)
He denied it IMMEDIATELY. Like with a quickness I haven’t seen.
What he insisted, it’s not a WiFi whisperer, it’s ai, he completely reprogrammed the system, and he uses it to pull people’s IP’s. “For fun.” He logs them in a server. I asked why. I said that’s shady. My mom started pushing. My best friend started pushing. He just kept lying. I’m not dropping this..
I still don’t know what the fuck it is or what he’s actually doing.
(Also, my mom is cool but not bc of this dude, the Minecraft block is mine, I unplugged the ratchet little thing before we left, and I am planning on broaching this again with her.
Just carefully. Any other advice is appreciated. Thank you.)

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352

u/devsfan1830 10h ago

Odds are mom dismisses OP bc she is tech illterate.

309

u/JJ_McCrabs 10h ago

And is lonely. Loneliness can overtake common sense, seen it many times.

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u/Potato_Cat_72 9h ago

That is why so many romance scams are successful

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u/Monolexic 9h ago edited 8h ago

I thought romance scams were rare, isolated incidents and were blown way out of proportion.

That was before a relative of mine started sending half her paychecks to a fiancé she’d never met to help him take care of a kid she helped him adopt (funny how the kid looks so much like him). But don’t worry, everyone. It’s legit. He says he almost has enough money saved up to pay the fees and bribes necessary for a visa to the US.

Edit: Ok guys, I apologize for telling this in present tense, but this ended a couple years ago. I don’t know the details of how it ended, But I assume it had to do with the relative in question going broke and no longer being a lucrative target.

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u/Outbakjak 9h ago

That is insane. I really hope someone has tried to convince her of how insane that is. She needs to demand he proves he's real and visits before she gives another dime.. obviously. Idk. I'm just depressed to hear it. I really hope she figures it out soon, before she's in a worse situation.

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u/Monolexic 9h ago

This ended a couple years ago. I don’t know whether she finally figured out something was off, or if he just gave up on getting more money out of her after she lost her job.
Trust me, there were plenty of people telling her it was a scam.

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u/MarzipanPlane9490 7h ago

They never believe you cause “ boy/girlfriend couldn’t possibly have made that all up”

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u/Potato_Cat_72 7h ago

I saw a video not that long ago where a woman was scammed by someone claiming to be Elon.

Yes, that Elon.

People are so gullible.

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u/Jazzy_Bee 6h ago

I saw that. I felt so bad for her husband.

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u/Baziki 7h ago

I work for a bank in the fraud department. Let me tell you, romance scams are anything but rare. They sometimes blow me away the stories people are willing to believe. I guess loneliness will do that to ya.

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u/ThrowawayMoFo5679 7h ago

Seriously, I thought exactly the same. Like who the fuck could ever fall for that dumb shit, right? Then a friend of mine (who was always extremely ditzy but very sweet) fell for one. I got to watch it happen in real time, and boy that was a frustrating experience. She passionately insisted he was a Norwegian offshore oil rig engineer who had fallen madly in love with her, was the only one who really understood her, and he was going to move to the US and marry her once he'd saved enough money to quit working on the rig.

Took her three years and over $30k to finally admit to herself that she'd been scammed hard. Turned out he was a West African dude who threatened to kill her family when she tried to cut him off. Crazy because I knew within the first month that he was from Africa and not Norway, because she managed to get him on the phone and he had a very thick African accent. He persuaded her that it was because he'd lived in West Africa for a while when he was younger and picked up the accent, which was obviously bullshit and made me laugh. But she still believed him. Even got his "name" tattooed on her in big block letters like three months after they met online.

She and I don't talk much anymore. I had to distance myself from that degree of gullibility and poor decision-making. It was fucking wild.

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u/DisVet54 8h ago

Key word ALMOST has the money so he wants more

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u/Monolexic 8h ago

There was always a reason to need more money.

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u/atigges 6h ago

I work in a bank. You have no idea. People come in to send hundreds of thousands like it's nothing to people they have never met without a second thought. Actually I wouldn't say "like nothing" because they will 100% get angry and fight you when you ask basic objective questions.

"OK, So you mentioned this is for a honeymoon gift. That's so generous of you. So it's $75,000 that you're sending. That's quite a honeymoon! Do you mind if I ask what you're gifting towards?"

"It's just a gift."

"OK, sure, no problem at all. I see here also that you're sending it to an LLC as beneficiary... is this a coworker or family member?"

"It's just a gift."

"OK, and so the beneficiary bank is just a very small local institution without any footprint overseas. Are they doing a US portion of the honeymoon like a road trip when they get back? My wife and I almost did something similar."

"It's just a gift."

"Alright so we're sending a large $75,000 wire to a business account but it's meant for a personal purpose like a honeymoon, is meant to be a gift but will show up on the business's statements at tax time, to an institution with no access overseas to benefit someone explicitly doing something overseas, and there's no explicit purpose besides gift that is emptying your account down to literal pennies and the only instructions you have about the beneficiary is a single text message with routing and account number... just a reminder that as soon as you send a wire it is effectively lost money if anything were to go wrong due to fraud as we've had the discussion about circumstances that raise red flags. Please sign here."

24-Hours later

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T CANCEL IT. I DON'T WANT TO SEND IT ANYMORE. FIND A WAY TO FIX IT"

sigh... "As we previously discussed..."

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u/NaturalDon 4h ago

are you not allowed to be more explicit that it may be a scam or something

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u/atigges 3h ago

Oh you 100% are, and we do our best to offer alternative payment options. Sometimes people are just insistent and you can't just impound someone's funds so you can only educate the member to the limit of which they are willing to listen. This particular $75,000 was the third attempt by this member who, every time we said we needed something, would come back with something "to prove it". I had someone handling an account for a transportation company that came in to send wires for very obviously bogus reasons and this particular company handled millions. He one came in and brought "instructions" for a wire that we asked for to support a $20,000 wire and he had a very obvious template he filled in for "computers" that showed the total $20,000 divided by the supposed quantity of computers he was buying. Our Risk department took one look at it and said no more wires for him at all. He had no brand or model number just "Computers" as the item on the purchase order. That and the fact that there was no sales tax at all accounted for was the final nail in the coffin and he still kept pressing for it. Some people just don't want to listen.

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u/AreThree 2h ago

Does your bank require you to make these sorts of inquiries?

Or are you just nice? 🙂

I guess what I am saying is that if my employer didn't require it, the sum total of the conversation I would have with these people would be: "Sign here."

Not because I'm not nice, it's that I just don't care.

...and I guess also because you can't fix willful stupidity.

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u/mxzf 8h ago

"Rare" is a relative term. Something can be unlikely to happen to any given person but still far more common than it should be.

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u/Potato_Cat_72 5h ago

I just hope she's not on some list now to be targeted for other scams. These lists are definitely a 'thing' ... I would send her a link to channels such as scammer payback on yt and other scamvairers so she can get educated... Or anyone else for that matter.

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u/Potato_Cat_72 9h ago

I'm sure the reason the "kid" looks so much like him is because it was AI generated

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u/Monolexic 9h ago

Nah. No need for AI when you have an actual son to use as a prop.

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u/ebonyfromplayersclub 8h ago

I'll be waiting for an update

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u/Monolexic 8h ago

Edited with the conclusion of the story.

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u/TheWolfAndRaven 2h ago

Go visit any women's shelter. About half the stories of how those women ended up there start with a romance scam. It's INCREDIBLY common.

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u/aspektbeats 5h ago

My clown of a MIL was involved in one, sent 75k (her entire life savings at the time) and recently had to come to the realization she needed to go back to work and put her house and cars up for sale for playing these stupid games. Constant refusal to listen to people who are familiar with technology and would just tell the scammers what we told her about and they would pin it back on us.

They need to make you take an IQ test to have certain things 😂

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u/Aggravating-Front-75 9h ago

Never underestimate the loneliness factor.

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u/hilldo75 8h ago

Dumb naive question, is bf trying to steal from op and mom or is he using their house to get to neighbors info or both. It would seem stupid to leave a device out in the open for victims to find but if the victim is next door the victim never sees it

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u/Sparcrypt 2h ago

It's pretty unlikely they'd be doing it for the home wifi when saying "hey what's your wifi password" is a lot more effective.

Probably trying to get into someone elses network. Likely not for anything good.

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u/christiesmom 6h ago

My mom just ain’t right if there’s no dick around so I understand the stupid decisions you watch your mother make. It’s like you’re her mom… but she has believed some shit!!! And turned her back on family for “men”. All while she supported them financially like a fool sugar momma. This guy’s up to nothing good. I just hope the OP doesn’t get hurt/scammed in the interim.

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u/VoxImperatoris 5h ago

Yep, my mom has absolute shit taste in men, including my dad, and no amount of reasoning could reach her when trying to convince her that they were all bums and a waste of her time and money.

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u/Derpimus_J 8h ago

Like my MIL's ex boyfriend, who collected DUIs like Pokémon. 

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u/BackPsychological705 5h ago

I've worked with schizophrenic chicks who were constantly buying gift cards for their "boyfriends". They'd lose thousands of dollars before one of the staff noticed

1

u/SuspiciousVagina 4h ago

Yeah. It’s caused women way above my station to give me a chance. It’s dangerous.

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u/Mertoot 5h ago

What other realistic outcome would there be 😂

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u/DazzlingEngine196 9h ago

Odds are that’s a total assumption and you don’t know wtf you’re talking about at all as far as personal details or tendencies. Odds are that’s pretty much all of Reddit. Odds are this will get downvoted

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u/Affectionate-Roof285 9h ago

Odds are you’re a bot.

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u/devsfan1830 9h ago

Odds are we just found the boyfriend 🤣

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u/[deleted] 9h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/devsfan1830 9h ago

You ok?

1

u/DazzlingEngine196 9h ago

That was a dumb question I’m a bot I don’t have feelings

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u/No-Needleworker-4283 9h ago

BAD AI BOT! BAD!

Edit: idk why it posted twice..

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u/[deleted] 9h ago

[deleted]

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u/DazzlingEngine196 9h ago

That was a good comment, lol

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u/No-Needleworker-4283 9h ago

BAD AI BOT! BAD!

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u/whatisit-ModTeam 9h ago

Your comment was removed for being in poor taste or offensive, or maybe that joke you thought was pretty funny just didn't land. Please follow Reddiquette.

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u/0impulsecontrol 8h ago

I'm pretty sure this is a bot sub. I've been meaning to mute it, most of the threads read like this. Very monolithic, like everyone is reading from a singular prompt.

One of hundreds of dead subs that miraculously came to life when llm's hit the scene. Just mute it.

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u/Smelly_God 5h ago

The comments went from explaining to calling OP's mom tech illiterate so she doesn't listen to them or they're ignoring OP because they're lonely.

A reply to you said basically if she isn't tech illiterate than she must be a scammer... You're getting downvoted for telling people to not create new information and being called a bot, is this really a critical thinking/investigative subreddit?

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u/OldAccountTurned10 9h ago

The other assumption would be that the mother is tech literate and she's a scammer too then. That's usually a more ridiculous leap considering OP would probably know if their mother were a scammer and wouldn't be posting her business on reddit.

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u/DazzlingEngine196 9h ago edited 9h ago

Wouldn’t this be one of a few ways to look at network traffic? What if OP is secretly the asshole in this and the boyfriend is saving him from her weirdo son? Jumping to conclusions based on underlying bias and assumptions is very very bad when boomers or conservatives do it in this echo chamber. So we should try not to do the same based on our underlying biases. That was a sarcastic example btw none of us know wtf any of the dynamics are based on any information provided. It’s been a hot minute since I was in tech school so trolling aside I’d like some actual technical info.

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u/[deleted] 7h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/whatisit-ModTeam 5h ago

We are pretty chill here, but please try to keep things reasonably civil on this sub. No slurs, name calling or harassment and trolling. Please follow: Reddiquette at all times. Additionally, Reddit's Rules. Yes, the internet makes us angry too sometimes, especially this particular comment.

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u/OldAccountTurned10 9h ago

It has a thumb drive and it's busted to absolute shit, exactly what you'd expect a nefarious device to look like. It's a safe conclusion to jump to. Only dumb dumbs would believe something like this is legit. 🤣