“Owen” (or whoever) strikes up a casual conversation with what he hopes is a lonely, older, female WWF player. Then we put our deerstalker detective hats on: a few minutes of energetic Googling turned up a long thread on the Zynga user forum about this scam. I showed Mom how to block a player on WWF. So even without the red-flag repetition of the same script across three different people, she was skeptical. The conversation turned creepy the moment Owen asks my mother how tall she is. Here’s a stitched-together screenshot of one such conversation: As each match proceeded, the man (often named Owen) would share that his wife had died in childbirth, and that his daughter was being raised by a cousin or a nurse while he worked aboard ship. In separate matches over a few weeks, not one, not two, but three different opponents claimed to be widowed engineers working aboard ships on the high seas. Players of WWF can trade instant messages with opponents during each match, so there’s a social component to the game. She is also such a fan of the online Scrabble knockoff “Words with Friends” (WWF) that I might use the word addiction to describe her relationship with the game and only be exaggerating a smidge.ĭuring a recent visit, Mom shared an odd experience she had while playing that turned out to be a new kind of scam. Here’s how to protect yourself and your family. New predators are stalking older women via chat in online games.
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