Damn, that’s my time to shine.

There’s a huge scam business in Western Europe, those people pretend to be online marriage agencies and hire young and naive people to work as “translators”. In their job offers they say that their translators help women and men make connections (men are mostly Americans so they speak English, women on the websites are mostly slavic, therefore the translators). In reality, there’s no real women, just dozens of fake accounts and thousands of “translators”, whose job is to write sexy/flirty messages to men 24/7 but without asking for money directly. I was one of them, even though I quit after a couple of days when I realised this whole story isn’t about marriage at all lol (don’t blame me, I was 18 and it sounded like an interesting stuff to do).

Realising it was a scam was already a good reason for me to quit, but there was a moment that also broke my heart a bit. So, I was texting men trying to get their attention (they paid for every minute of the text chat) and one of them finally showed some interest.

His name was Bob, he was a 73y.o dude from Phoenix. You can imagine what kind of messages men sent me there, but he was different. It seemed like he just wanted to talk about life. He told me about his wife’s death, his daughter’s suicide, his 6 cats, their names and what they like to do. We discussed flowers on his backyard, gardening and lots of small things… Bob spent a shitton of money on this conversation because it lasted a couple of hours. He paid for a simple human interaction, he didn’t want to meet, didn’t write anything horny, didn’t ask creepy questions. He just wanted to talk because he was lonely and he didn’t find a better place than an e-thot online market that marriage agency really was.

At the end of our conversation, I wished him good luck and told him he shouldn’t use websites like that. The second he went offline, I texted my manager and quit. A couple of months later, the “agency” stopped existing.