Should you send a scammer money?

[Wayne]

I'm noticing a trend on places like Twitter for baiters making "You know, not all scammers are bad guys" posts. I'm even seeing some where they send the scammers money to help them move away from scamming. Would I ever do that? No, and here's why:

I've been doing this for a long time. A REALLY long time. 17 years to be exact. In that time I've seen a whole lot of stuff, spoken to a whole lot of scammers and talked to a whole lot of people who were scammed. One thing that I saw time and again is scammers changing their stories to try and manipulate more money out of a person. The most common one was "Yes, I was scamming you at the start, but I really did fall in love with you and want to be with you now", inevitably followed by "If you send me money then I can stop scamming". That's like an alcoholic saying "I won't ever go to the pub again if you buy me a few bottles of vodka every week". All you're doing is giving them money for a different reason. It's the same with the other excuses I've seen. "I'm forced to scam because I want to go to college and can't afford to any other way. If you would sponsor me then I wouldn't have to scam". Doing so would reward their scamming, and do you really believe they'll stop rather than keep telling you they have while scamming others? We've even had scammers come to us personally and say "I'm a scammer who wants to stop. I'm willing to tell you all you need to know about scamming and even give you details of scammers. Oh, and by the way, is there any chance you could pay me for doing it?" to which we had to point out that none of us gets paid for what we do, so why would we pay someone for snitching on their fellow scammers.

So in summary - from our experience, almost every time a scammer has asked for money to help "go straight" it's been nothing more than a ploy to extract money using a different tactic. That's our experience, and your mileage may vary. Suffice to say though, if I get asked by a scammer to help support them so they can stop scamming, all I'm going to see is them coming at me from a different angle but with the same goal in trying to part me from my money. Actually giving them anything simply encourages them to pull the same trick on others.