Daily Beast Looks at Adult Performers and Fans Victimized by ‘eWhoring’ Impersonation Scams

In an intriguing story at The Daily Beast, titled ‘The Fake Porn Stars Scamming Lonely Guys Out of Big Money During the Pandemic’, writer Mark Hay notes that the shady practice of impersonating porn stars to fleece their fans — a brand of ‘eWhoring’ — has seen an uptick amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Among the adult performers who offered details of how these scammers operate are Jade Kush, Jayden Cole and Cherie DeVille.

A few months back, Lars* found a profile for porn star Jade Kush online, which featured a Skype handle for fans to contact her. So, he added her on Skype—and was thrilled when, almost immediately, she started to text him. They traded pictures and small talk about life; she called him a handsome man and got flirty, saying it didn’t matter to her that he had a wife. He asked if they could take their budding digital romance to the next level with a video chat. She requested a $100 Amazon gift card in return. He obliged. She told him not to show the card to anyone else. Then she started coming up with excuses as to why she couldn’t do the video chat—bad timing, a dirty camera lens. Lars started to get skeptical, but she insisted she loved him truly and deeply. Then she told him that she needed “some money like $300 to get some food and stuff’s in the house.”

“I promise I will never let you down,” she said. “Do this for me from your own kind heart.”

That’s when Lars found an email for the actual Jade Kush on one of her actual social media profiles, and reached out to confirm his growing suspicion: That he’d been scammed by one of a large number of fraudsters who digitally impersonate porn stars online to target their fans.

 

No one tracks the number of fake porn star accounts or scams connected to them. Performers say they usually only learn they’ve been impersonated if and when fans spot and alert them to bogus accounts, or scam victims reach out—often hurt and confused. . . . Performer Jayden Cole adds that she updated her Instagram bio to read, “I’m not messaging you on a ‘backup account,’” just to address this issue.

These grifts are a subset of what fraudsters and researchers alike refer to as eWhoring scams, in which typically men (whose IP addresses trace back to West and South Africa or Southeast Asia) pretend to be young women on dating, forum, and social media apps and sites in order to strike up conversations with dozens of people simultaneously, flatter and flirt with them, then start asking for money.

Fake eWhoring accounts also frequently exploit the popular fiction that porn is a grim criminal world full of danger—and many fans’ desire to be white knights, riding to a star’s rescue.

The Daily Beast recently spoke to a half-dozen major adult performers—as well as several digital-security experts—who all attested that the number of these scam accounts appears to have increased rapidly in recent months. Performer Cherie DeVille says she’s receiving twice as many reports as she used to . . . .

“I’ve just reported two accounts that popped up within the last 24 hours” to the sites hosting them in order to get them taken down, Cole told The Daily Beast in a phone interview.

“Fans need to realize that we will never have ‘private pages for special fans’ that have like 100 followers and through which we message them first,” says Kush. “Most of us will also never directly ask for money, or set up escort meets through our Instagram inboxes.” 

Read the full Daily Beast article here.