09-13-2018, 08:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-13-2018, 08:04 PM by gayprojectforum.)
I received this email:
"I send you this email because I need a real help and I don’t know what to do. I am a 25 year old guy who has always lived a lot of isolation, normal family, no coming out at home but passable relationships with parents, they don’t ask too many questions, I don’t know if they understood something but the point is not this.
So, a couple of months ago, a bit to try to give vent to the sense of loneliness that I have always taken within me, I signed up on a gay site, no dating sites or anything like that, just a gay site and I would say a very good gay site. I talked to the administrator and some staff guys and I had a very good impression. The site also has a chat, a simple thing, an IRC chat, which I often attended, sometimes it’s possible to do there some serious discussion, other times the chatting is very casual, even on the trivial, but always polite and then there are the operators who intervene in case of need, in short, it's an environment that I like a lot.
In the forum of the group, at a certain point joined a guy whom I will call Mark, and he sent a presentation post that I liked a lot, let's say simple but very pleasant, I answered his message and he answered mine, he seemed to me just a nice person and so I asked him if we could get in touch in chat to talk with less complications. We got in touch in chat, he gave me a lot of compliments for the things I wrote him. The first few times we kept the conversation on general subjects, then the conversation become a lot more free and he told me that he is not Italian but Californian and that it will stay in Italy only for a short time because his friends are all there and often chat with him.
I graduated in languages and all my work is done in English, I was wary happy to be able to chat in English with a native English speaker but he told me that he was perfecting Italian in Italy and preferred to talk with me in Italian. Our dialogue, however, seemed strange to me, in some way different from the dialogues with the other guys I met in chat, he asked me questions apparently generic but in reality tried to make me interested in him, I would almost say that I worried about him. He told me that he had experienced so many frustrations, that he had had many family problems and that he had never talked about gay things with anyone because in the family they would have killed him. Before closing the chat there was a very long exchange of greetings and smiley faces. After the first week a good relationship had been created between us and I was beginning to be happy with his friendship.
Then another gay joined the forum, a very young guy, who had just turned 18, and with him it happened something very similar to what had happened with Mark and also with him slowly I created a good relationship but he too made me feel anxiety, when we talked, he behaved as if I neglected him, he always greeted me with very ambiguous messages that made it clear that I had been rude to him and he had felt uncomfortable.
Now in practice I spend all my time chatting with these two guys but I start to feel the thing a little unpleasant. If I don’t call them, they call me but almost obsessively and reproach me for not having called them, they complain that they have been neglected, etc. etc. .. In short, for me they are becoming a real concern, because not to meet them I should abandon completely the site and the chat that I like a lot and where I have real friends, but if I go in chat I find myself in front of one or both of them too and they don’t give up. What should I do?"
I quote my answer below.
"The attitude of the two individuals is quite characteristic and there is reason to think that they are not two but one and then there is one thing that seems strange: a guy raised in the US doesn’t speak with you in English? The thing doesn’t make sense, he can also be in Italy to perfect Italian but everything raises big doubts. I would advise you to do some basic things:
1) Immediately notify the chat operators of your doubts, because what happened to you may have happened to others. So ask the operators if those users are really known. It often happens that in IRC chat a user who is trusted may receive the "voice" this means that this user is entered as a registered user in a particular list that enables him to some skills. If the users you're talking about are not operators or "voice", you have to be careful because the chats are public and you never know who's behind them. There are also the thefts of nicks, because the IRC chat nicknames expire after 30 days of non-use and if one registers a nickname just expired he can be mistaken for the user whose nick has expired, but nick theft are rare because they require a very careful environmental monitoring and laborious procedures, typically a "voice" user is a real user.
2) In IRC chats there is a particular command called “Whois” with which you can know the connection IP of another user. Not all IRC chat clients allow the “Whois” without writing the appropriate command i.e. directly using client support, but making the login to the chat from a client where it is possible (there are several and the chat operators can give you all the indications) you easily get to know the IP of a user. Once the IPs of the two suspicious users are detected, if they are identical or very similar, i.e. with the first and second group of digits identical, you must immediately alert the operators because it’s (certainly, if the IPs are identical, and most likely if the IPs are very similar) a single person who uses two different identities, a sign that it’s good to be in guard.
3) Through an IP locator you can easily know with good approximation from where a user calls, unless he uses a proxy, but this is unlikely for ordinary users. If one has told you that he’s in a city and calls from another, that is, has an IP of another, it means that he lies and you must immediately notify the operators.
4) Keep in mind that using two different browsers on the same computer you can appear in chat with two different identities but always with the same IP. So seeing two characters together in the same chat does not rule out that they are actually the same person.
5) If you meet the American guy in chat, make sure that "he" has to write using accented words, like "perché", or "può" or "così" because in the US keyboard there are no accented vowels, so if in a guy's messages you see accented words it means that he uses an Italian keyboard and it is not at all likely that an American guy accustomed to the US headboard will use the Italian keyboard.
6) When you are chatting with these characters keep all the logs of conversations, absolutely avoid to put at risk your privacy, never go in voice and less than ever on cam because you could be registered.
7) Keep in mind that the first interest of the Administrator and the Chat Operators is that the chat is not polluted, so eliminating fakes from the chat is very important to them even more than it is to you. Let me know how it ends up."
Two days later I received the following answer.
"You were right! But how did you understand that? The IPs used by the two guys were identical! And yet the thing of the accents worked, the accents were there. I tried to talk to the "Californian" guy in English but he always answered me in Italian! I spoke with the operators and they thanked me a lot, they told me that they would deepen things with their means so as to take discrete and effective measures. I never imagined that such things could happen, you opened my eyes! The operators with me were very kind and they told me that if everyone collaborated, there would be no strange characters in the chat!"