Does MySpace count?
Recently one of my friends pointed me to a profile on MySpace of a guy who was shopping for a Korean wife. Korea really doesn't do mail-order brides anymore so we decided to get abusive.

I created a fake account on MySpace listing my gender as female, my ethnicity as Asian, and my location as North Korea. I messaged the guy telling him that North Korea is a worker's paradise, and he should come to Pyongyang to visit me. This became my thing and I had a lot of fun with it for a couple days.

After I was through with wife-shoppers, I discovered that a large number of people, mainly American GIs, had listed their location as "Seoul, Democratic People's Republic of Korea." I messaged them ranting about the glory of North Korea, and would often get messages back like "WTF i hate north korea." Consider this a free geography lesson, chums.

I stopped using the account and the messages and offers stacked up. Once I logged back in to find my female North Korean self had become quite popular, with all sorts of messages asking me to visit them if I ever escape, and asking me if I'd consider all sorts of interracial relationships.

The freakiest one was Andrew. In his first message to me he said his friend has access to all sorts of "decoders for FCC and military regulated telecommunitcations frequencies" and asked me "Would you like to make a buy for satellite decoders of FCC or military frequecy applications??"

After that he started trying to recruit me into his own little counter-intelligence ring. He works at the army intel recodrs repository, although probably in a pretty low down position. I figured he was just a low-down guy looking to impress his superiors ("Look, I recruited a North Korean spy!") so he could get into the James Bond lifestyle.

He offered to open a credit card account with a $5000 limit as an act of good faith, and began calling himself "Handsome American Guy, Andrew."

At this point I decided I should really see how far this guy would go, but I maintained silence so all his messages would be unsolicited. Of course I wasn't going to go for the money. Unless it became extremely easy.

At one point I decided to see if I could scare him. I registered a free e-mail on a Chinese website and claimed to be her brother. I said that she was unable to send messages through the North Korean filter, but she could read all his messages and was in love with him. I myself was a defector living in Beijing and communication with my sister was slow. I asked him to take a picture of himself holding a letter addressed to her, which he never did and ending my serious attempts to have him arrested. I said that she was planning to escape the country, and would come to America to visit him.

This had all been happening over several months, and all my friends were getting extremely bored with it. I didn't log in for a long time, and in July I checked again, receiving this message:

"I recently had a legal dispute with local university. They tried to make a criminal charge against me for reporting political flyers on their campus. Somehow, your name from Myspace.com came into the conversation of legal documents. I can not beleive that they are worse than what the United States of America calls the North Korean government. I received you e-mail from MSN hotmail.com and had to use it as legal evidence in my defense. I feel like the campus police can do whatever they what with their authority, they are so powerfull. I will keep you informed if they ask more questions about North Korea, or The Peoples Republic of China. I hope you understand that I am defenseless in this situation in defending your photo on Myspace.com from becoming legal evidence. Blame the CMU university police."

At this point he's either trying to intimidate me into giving something up, or he has actually been caught for sending these sorts of messages to North Koreans and is getting what he deserve, without me having to confess who I am or turn him in.

Anyway, my original intent was to see how many weird creepy messages a random Asian girl would receive through MySpace. The result was staggering. So how far did I take it? I guess it's still ongoing. Currently there is a standing offer for me to stay at his place if I escape North Korea. I still might bust him at some point, but I'm under the assumption now he's a joker trying to string me along. Still, he did offer to give military secrets and a bunch of money to someone he thought was North Korean. That can't be not treason.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Fri 14 Sep 2007, 3:25, Reply)