"Your audience is dumb." Pussy Galore A mad genius has clicked through those "░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░" links spamming X-formerly-Twitter — and found something as dark as it is mundane. In an investigation conducted by technology writer John Herrman for
New York Magazine , the journalist found that ultimately, all those hilariously-horny declarations lead to the same place: a scammy Dutch-owned sexual fantasy chat site that outsources its labor to low-income countries. As Herrman found, all those "PIB" links go through the same chain of redirects: first a site called Xkos, then a site called Meetdats, and then a plethora of phony social network links imitating OnlyFans and TikTok. Clicking one of those ads prompts users to respond to a series of bizarre sign-up questions that ask everything from one's age to whether they're down for "quick sex, not dating." After completing the inquisition, users are redirected one final time to a site called Provocative Neighbors, which only asks people for their credit card information at the very end of a second set of sign-up questions. According to its own terms of service, that site is a "fantasy entertainment" service where "profiles are fictional and your interactions will be with operators." Neighbor Danger Provocative Neighbors, it turns out, is owned by a Netherlands-based company called Meteor Interactive. In 2022, that company was the subject of a
BBC investigation that found that it contracts with gig work companies sourcing cheap sexually-oriented labor from Suriname, the former Dutch colony sandwiched by
Brazil and Guyana on South America's east coast. The Surinamese workers that Meteor contracted with were, as the BBC found in its previous dive into the contractor's business practices, provided with scripts and incentivized to collect commissions by essentially inundating users with $1-per-message exchanges. In one post on the r/RomanceScams subreddit from two years ago, a visitor to another Meteor-owned site, Womenwithsecrets.com, said that they ended up being charged $2,000 after several drunken exchanges, some of which led to other swindles, including a
Bitcoin scam. (Lest you feel bad for that user, however, they also admitted in their post that they ended up sending "unsolicited" dick pics.) Notably, Herrman wrote that although it seems outrageously widespread, it's unlikely that the "PIB" bots are part of a massive botnet. Rather, "we’re probably seeing a deceptively small cluster of affiliate marketers seizing on X’s diminished defenses with industry-standard techniques" — and the memeification of the phenomenon, with lots of actual humans posting fake " ░M░Y░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░ " replies, only serves to inflate its perceived size. "Things like these come and go every six months," an adult marketer who uses the handle SocialManipulator on hacker sites told NYMag . Before the PIB spam, SocialManipulator notes, there was "Netflix and F U C K M E," from which people "made a killing." The bottom line? "Your audience is dumb," the marketer concluded. More on scams: Woman Discovers Trick to Get $27,000 in Free Gas