The Leeds crossbow shooter is not the only man to have become a target of the growing industry of organised fraudsters, but he’s a concerning example of its potential impact

~ Anon ~

Last month Owen Lawrencewent to Otley Road in Leeds with arms full of weapons and, according to his Facebook (FB) profile, the explicit intention of engaging in a “killing spree”. Having lived in Leeds for the best part of two decades it was big news amongst my social circles, so I checked out his multiple FB accounts to find out who he was. A lot of his posts fitted a certain stereotype, complaints that he’s struggling to meet women, a photo of him doing a Nazi salute, many many posts about mass shooters, and so on.

However his profiles also had over 1,800 FB friends, almost all of whom appeared to be young, conventionally attractive women. This might seem unusual for a guy who was struggling socially and romantically but it’s the kind of friends lists I’ve seen quite a lot recently, belonging to men who can’t seem to meet anyone in person.

There are a lot of social, economic, and political factors contributing to the rise of misogyny, many of which have been covered by other people, but one thing that seems to be likely to be contributing to incel culture specifically is the sheer number of scammers targeting heterosexual men. These scammers are at least as likely to be men as women, and as with scams in other fields their patterns indicate they’re likely to be working as part of bigger operations, rather than alone. While the views expressed by a lot of these men might not endear them to many of us, it is concerning that many men are coming to conclusions about what women are like based on interactions with teams of professional fraudsters.

The internet in general has been feeling very Bladerunner, with endless bots and fake profiles with AI generated profile pictures or photos stolen from OF models. Some of the fake accounts are more obvious than others, some seem to have a chatbot behind them, with comments ranging from slightly off to completely nonsensical. Many of them seem to have humans or teams of humans behind them, but certainly not the individuals they’re claiming to be. Dating apps, dating websites, and dating groups are particularly bad for this.

If you have any experience of online dating or talk to people who have, you’ll know it’s getting pretty rough out there for everyone for various reasons. If you talk to heterosexual men, or see what they’re saying about the apps, the Facebook dating groups, the various websites for meeting people, you’ll find a lot of them declare it’s a total waste of time.

Some of these men claim that the dating platforms are full of bots and scam profiles. Some of them say the dating platforms are full of gold diggers. It’s took me a while to put two and two together, but I think they’re talking to the same people.

My first clue that some men might be getting angry at non-existent women was a few years ago when an old classmate of mine got into Jordan Peterson. It was your typical situation, he would bombard me with videos, ask me what I thought, wouldn’t read my response, and would send me more videos. One of the last videos he sent me was a comedian complaining about the “epidemic of money grabbing whores”. It seemed strange to me that my friend was even complaining about this. He’d not been in a relationship in years, he wasn’t dating, he was just getting drunk online and getting himself wound up.

At the time I suspected that either he’d purposefully hired some women and was upset that they were only interested in getting paid, or he was just sat at home imagining reasons to get resentful, inspired entirely by claims from other men. Having seen the similarities between his statements and those from men who’ve been talking to scammers, it seems just as likely that this happened to him too.

That didn’t really dawn on me until a little later, when FB recommended me an absolute train wreck of a dating group. Post after post from fake profiles who’d stolen their photos from the Instagram pages of OF models, each one with hundreds of comments from men saying “stunning”, “GORGEOUS [loveheart eyes emoji]”, “hi”, etc, to which the fake profiles replied with the exact same responses “Send me a friend request so we can chat” and so on. This can’t be improving these men’s conversational skills. Stats stating 10% of profiles on dating sites are fake are pretty believable, but clearly some places have turned into havens for them.

I’d often see the “women’s” profiles use bad ai generated profile pictures which have the advantage for the scammers, that they’re not wasting as much time on guys who are less naive, (making scams obvious is a tactic used by some scammers to focus their efforts on easier targets), plus their profiles won’t get reported by the model who’s photos they stole. The stolen photos are the source of much frustration to the women who they belong to. These scammers are not just giving a particular impression of women, they’re fleecing men while posing as the specific women who’s photos they’ve stolen. So at least the AI photos are a welcome development away from that.

The men in this group also wrote posts, not very alluring ones. Just a photo of the underside of their chin with no info about themselves, but with lots of comments seemingly from supermodels saying they wanted to date them and to get in touch. The posts from men that specified “no scammers!!” got even more responses from scammers, because it’s clear that they’d not only been successfully targeted before, but are naive enough to think that simply announcing that they don’t want to be targeted will ensure that they aren’t.

The group would also regularly have men complaining about how women are all after their money, how none of them will meet up without being sent a gift card code (or whatever the preferred scammer payment method was at the time) with some excuse about travel/babysitting/etc, and then when they get the money they ghost. They’d often conclude that women think that just because they’re super hot and look like models that they think they’re owed men’s cash.

I realised this group wasn’t the most egregious example of a scammer hangout. The admin was at least a real person doing a bad job. There were occasional posts from genuine women, and people from the group occasionally did meet up. But a superficial search found more groups, each in a worse state, and “dating pages” clearly set up by the scammers themselves.

For example Single women in UK (sic) where pictures of nameless women are posted by the page (no profiles are linked, it’s just a photo). Men comment trying to somehow get the attention of the nameless profileless woman in the photo, and then scam profiles reply. I find it hard to believe anyone would fall for this, but the men continue to comment and the page wouldn’t exist if they weren’t successfully fleeced at least every now and then. Reading through this stuff is exasperating, and feels sad and weird.

Some of the guys are such easy marks that almost all the comments on their personal FB profiles are from fake profiles. As is often the case with victims of scamming, a lot of the guys who are consistently successfully targeted seem to have other stuff going on (lack of support, failed relationships, drug abuse problems, etc). The scammers swarm their profiles like flies on shit, and the men continue to engage in the hope that they’re talking to real people. These men’s FB friends lists looked a lot like Owen Lawrence’s.

Understanding the rising popularity of misogyny in general requires looking at the broader economic and political landscape. One of the trends causing a riftbetween men and women is the usual fighting over scraps, the classic pitting of one group against another that works to detract from the ruling class robbing us all. The amount of time people need to spend at work to survive has been going up, and in the vast majority of couples both people need to work full time.

Women are working longer hours before they start on the second shift. Still many men feel like being exhausted means that surely they shouldn’t have to do any housework. Though that’s wildly unreasonable on the face of it, sexist ideologies are going to look a lot more attractive when you’re increasingly desperately looking for excuses not to clean up after yourself.

If you add up all the hours of paid and unpaid work, job, childcare, housework, etc, then men are doing less than women, and single mothers have more free time than married ones. In light of this the constant talk of “gold diggers” broadcast by the manosphere can look utterly delusional. This myth of the gold digging woman persists even in spite of the fact that women’s wages have overtaken men’s and its persistence provides a cover for these scammers.

If men continue to believe that this is how women typically behave, they won’t be able to identify scammers as scammers and this will reinforce their perception that women behave like this, creating a misogynistic feedback loop. In spite of the reality of the situation, a lot of men are becoming increasingly resentful, fuelled by Tate, incel forums, etc, convincing them that women are soulless harpies trying to bleed them dry and take them for all they’re worth. Unfortunately this description of women very accurately describes scammers, which can’t be helping the situation.

Most men falling victim to this either don’t realise they’ve given money to scammers, or don’t want to admit that they have, but it’s the former that we need to be worried about. It’s hard to know how much fuel they’re adding to an already raging fire of misogynist sentiment online, but if we’re going to spend a full two weeks discussing the possibility that teen girls leaving mean emojis on social media accounts might be driving teen boys into a murderous rage (consider yourself lucky if the weird both-sidesing victim blaming conversations around Adolescence passed you by), then we could at least acknowledge that the social media dating scam industry might be priming grown men to accept the arguments presented to them by misogynistic grifters.

As is generally the case, Owen Lawrence’s social media accounts were taken down within a few hours of the incident. The counter terrorism police are still investigating motives, though since he died in hospital of his self-sustained injuries, finding a motive is no longer a priority for them.

Given the choice between “incel shooter” and “far right shooter”, the press has mostly opted for the first, as if these are two distinct groups, with only an occasionalfocus on his racism and nationalism. In fact the rise of misogynistic views and the rise of fascist ideology, particularly amongst men, are mutually reinforcing, and the despairing resentful worldviews promoted amongst incel culture have been a gift for the far right. Fascism capitalises on men’s alienation and frustration, and if the vast majority of your friends are scammers then that’s likely to be a very frustrating and alienating experience.

Terror attacks are only the most headline grabbing form of a far wider societal problem. Even just looking at the numbers of men killing women, for an individual woman the chances of being killed in an “incel terror attack” are low compared to the two women killed a week by men in the UK. Extreme public violence is the tip of an iceberg, the most visible manifestation of a larger hidden threat. Men are still the leading cause of premature death amongst women worldwide. Misogyny is already killing women, mostly behind closed doors.

Owen Lawrence posted fairly openly about the fact that he had mental health problems, his struggles with addiction, his hatred of his Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and how incredibly angry he felt. Both scammers and fascists are well known to prey on vulnerable people with mental health problems. Misogynistic views make men more susceptible to scammers as they’re less likely to identify them as such, and the scammers in turn reinforce these misogynistic views. The “angry at life” to “loving Hitler and hating women” pipeline is already well travelled, and the scammers are helping shuffle people along it.