I'm an Idiot

I have a confession to make. 

I've been scammed. Duped. Hoodwinked. Bamboozled. This is hard to admit, especially in light of the fact that I wrote a book on scamming. Actually a How To Guide on Scambaiting, that is, getting the best of scammers by outwitting them at their own game.

But now I find myself on the short end of the scam stick.

Allow me to unwind this story from the beginning. 

Being a late adopter to cultural trends, I recently caught Binging Fever. When MAX started showing up on my Peloton, The Sopranos started showing up in my workouts. Each almost hour-long episode of arguably the Top 5 shows made for the flat screen, was a perfect complement to my sweating/burning and earning calorie routine.

It took me a couple of months to work my way through 6 seasons. But I loved watching it a second time and picked up on some of the storylines that had escaped me on my regular Sunday night live HBO viewings.

As is the case in everything we do these days, the algorithms noticed my viewership. And bombarded me with anything that's even remotely Sopranos related. Or Sopranos-adjacent. Sure, I'll join the Stateline Diner Facebook Group. Why not, I've eaten there a coupla three hundred times or so. Mostly in the wee hours of the morning.

I also got cornered into joining a Sopranos Aficianado Fan Group. Why? Because I'm a lonely old man and I'm not writing crappy emails for Dollar Shave Club or PayPal anymore.

During one of my forays on the FB group chat, the Sopranos one not the Diner one, I got into a heated back and forth with a Garden State douchebag making derogatory comments about the mulinyan. I'm not a fan of bigots and call them out on their pigheaded behavior.

Moments after taking a righteous stand, I got a friend request from Robert Iler, the actor who played AJ in the Sopranos. I've never claimed to be the brightest LED bulb in the package but it didn't seem so far fetched that a former child actor -- and come on this guy was a 10 watt bulb at best -- would be trying to live off the fumes of his former fame.

The same operating theory held true when, weeks later, I got a similar request from the guy who played Johnny Sack, the chain smoking boss of the New York, who now wanted to dip his beak into my business.

Hell, I write some damn funny comments of Facebook. It didn't seem all that unusual that these D-listers would want to be my Metaverse friend.

Then I got a request from Big Pussy. And something didn't smell right. (No letters, please)

I knew something was stinky in downtown Paramus, when all three of these 'actors' started pitching cheesy Sopranos memorabilia on their newsfeeds. And sure enough, after a perfunctory perusal of the Reddit pages, my suspicions were solidified like the 6 month old ice cream served at Stateline.

I woke up to the con. My wish is that 75 million voters wake up before the next election.