I’m on my mobile so won’t research any extra detail right now…

I agree with the dish and I’m in no doubt that somebody from Nigeria cooked that recipe. They know each other and on the day Simon bought the fish, he says that he cooked it with a neighbour. If I cooked a meal with another Steemit user, I can 100% guarantee that I’d tag them. The same photo of the fish appears at a later date from a different user. It’s strange but the advocate would think it irrelevant.

On subject of the sandals, we’d call them flip flops and I prefer flip flops to sandals so it would be difficult to determine gender (assuming that I’m male). I put very little value in this anecdote. I know there’s an image of Vickyson holding the fish dish, perhaps the original photo will show her footwear.

She does say in her intro:

I do small business, I can't say business is good because is out of tracker

Which correlates with the idea that she sells street food. For me though, all of the "characters" require a real world person to support it so I have little doubt that details like this are true, even if they get other details "wrong" sometimes.

Some of the suspicion surrounds the use of the publicly available Facebook photos. If you have the Facebook account, you have access to the photos so why not use them instead of a half arsed screenshot? I only found this Facebook account through being friends with one of our protagonists - I’d never have found it through names alone.

Like the wasa account, I have no doubt that there’s a real person who is aware that the account exists and helps to support it through the use of photos (and maybe even a video call) when requested (see my reply to Simon for more on this). Including Facebook accounts - Facebook being a key tool in recruitment. (I.e. the prospect of making a few dollars and all you have to do is provide photos when requested).

That’s why it works and is so convincing. Users in Pakistan have been doing it for some time in their local villages. It’s also why once these errors are corrected (which they will be), it will be impossible to know if any newcomers are real. Which is a sad point that we have been approaching for some time.

This is the reason everything took so long to investigate and subsequently explain and present. And why it’s presented as a whole, rather than just one component.

Hence, the sadness in writing all of this down. So much of the emphasis of rewards evolves around “proving that you’re real” and then entering contests.