If you look at the ads for inmates claiming to be gay on this, or any other prison pen pal site, you will discover an inordinate number (vast majority) of these ads come from prisoners in Kentucky prisons, with Texas running a close second place! This curious state of affairs led me to conduct a survey and investigation, with input from prisoners in both states as well as the Kentucky and Texas Department of Corrections.

CONCLUSION: The vast majority of ads from prisoners claiming to be gay in Kentucky prisons are in fact fraudulent! These ads are posted, 92% of the time, by straight guys who have stumbled upon a rather interesting scam! They know that gay males have a much higher "disposable" income than their straight counterparts, especially those over 40, so the inmates target these guys for "donations", and solicit funds from them rather brazenly! One prisoner was recently discovered to have been writing 27 gay males on the outside and collecting money from each of them, and each "victim" believed this inmate was going to parole out to them upon release and live with them! He had managed over a 2 and 1/2 year period to collect over $21,000 this way, and was sending this money out to his wife who banked it for him!

Be very careful when writing these guys, because less than 1 out of 10 of these allegedly gay prisoners is actually gay. The rest are usually scam artists looking to prey on a gullible and vulnerable segment of society who tend to try and help "their own" when possible.

I think your percentages are a bit high and I find Florida, Arizona, Texas, Nevada to be areas of concern. I have been writing gay inmates for 25 years, yes the number of no replies is high in Kentucky for WAP ads, yet many are seeking single fellows not an established couple like myself. You can always put into your introduction letter that you just write and do not support inmates as I do. There is always someone who really needs mail and friendship so I intend to continue my adventure though you chose not to.

OK, understand first that I am not "defending" anything I pointed out earlier. Go to this very website and count the ads we are talking about here and see how many are from KY and TX and FL, etc...you might find ONE from AZ, FL has pretty much tried to stop their inmates from posting ads on sites like this FOR THIS VERY REASON! You apparently assume that I have decided not to write somebody because of what I have learned, or that I have had a bad experience. Neither asssumption is correct. I have not chosen not to continue my own adventure, as you put it. Please understand that though I only joined this forum today, I have been writing prisoners, gay and straight alike since 1979, which means what? 30 years experience! I have a straight guy doing life in Ohio, and every year he sends me a little list of Christmas and birthday gifts he'd lilke to get for his young daughter and I buy them for her and send them to her for him, and have been doing this since 1996. They are never very expensive, really, and it's something I know he'd do for me if our positions were reversed. This pattern of which I speak is not something I just noticed, it's been something I have been watching since 1981 with great interest. One of my more interesting observations is that the genuinely gay prisoners have seldom asked me for anything, it's the bogus ones that always, and I do mean ALWAYS get around to asking for money by the third letter! As soon as I sweetly but firmly let them know that I am not disposed to send money, that's the last I hear from them! The most obvious of the sociopaths seem to be housed in Texas facilities. I am not sure what you mean by "no reply" ads. I have never failed to get a response until I make it clear that there is no cash cow in my garage. I actually have a guy in Texas, a straight guy, who very much wants to come here on parole because we have become very close friends. About every 3 weeks he sends me a beautiful drawing, and I mean these are REALLY great art boards, that he does in incredible detail with nothing more than a number 2 pencil. On average I sell these on eBay for $50 to $70 each and he insists that I take out of that the listing fees eBay charges me to run the auction ads, and place the rest in the bank to pay for his plane ticket to join me when he gets released! Out of this money he has also had me get him a few books and one correspondence course in real estate appraisal, but he always provides the artwork that I turn into cash for him. When I mentioned these stats to him and the pattern I had noticed for years it was this prisoner who told me that it is really a very popular scam in Texas, and that entire groups of guys sit down at large tables in "common areas" in dayrooms and such to "milk their pidgeons" as they call it! He has a cousin in Kentucky who told me the same thing, but indicated that if anything, it was worse there! Now when two prisoners, one gay and one straight tell you this is a huge business for these convicts, you better believe the problem exists. All I wanted to do was warn people who might not be aware of "what to look for" or avoid like the plague that this was indeed a problem, and you have just confirmed it by nailing down some of the same states as "areas of concern". Obviously you have at least suspected this was an ongoing problem, or you would not be aware of it, let alone know what the worst offending states are!

Let me be very clear on this, lest anybody misunderstand my point: I would never attempt to discourage anybody from writing to gay prisoners. The hard and cruel reality is that many of these guys don't "come out" until they are inside and far too many get rejected immediately by friends and disowned by family when they do so, so if anybody needs pen pals it's the gays in prison. It's a weird phenomena, but the simple fact is a guy can murder 5 people in a robbery and his family will stick by him no matter what, but let them find out he's gay and they disown the poor guy in a New York second!

The guys you want to avoid are the ones who ARE NOT gay, but pretend to be for reasons already explained, and MOST of these are found in Kentucky and Texas. Make no mistake, you can find them everywhere, but are MOST LIKELY to find them in those two states.

I think we have a LOt of generalization going on here.

It is not just gay inmates who run scams or ask for money by the 3rd letter.

Straight men, bisexual men, straight women, lesbian woman and bisexual women have been known to do this.

This seems as if you only targeted one type of offender.

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William Jennings Bryan

You do realize that if you are 'selling' his artwork on his behalf in TX and sending him any of the money from the sale and the system finds out that he can be in serious trouble ?

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William Jennings Bryan

(Moderator Edited) I never said it was gay inmates who scam or ask for money by the third letter, if you actually READ these threads you'd realize what I said, IN (Moderator Edited)it is straight guys posing as gay ones who do this.

(Moderator Edited)

[quote=Richard Schubert; It's a weird phenomena, but the simple fact is a guy can murder 5 people in a robbery and his family will stick by him no matter what, but let them find out he's gay and they disown the poor guy in a New York second!


That is a weird phenomena, human nature is hard to understand at times, and that is one of them for sure !!!

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I agree. While I would never disown anyone due to sexual orientation, there are some people who would disown their only child because of it. I believe that a person should be able to be with whom they choose to be with, regardless of gender.

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William Jennings Bryan

Being an openly gay man I can't imagine why anyone would "pretend" to be gay. In my life I have been mugged, had cars spray painted with the "F" word and been threatened. I would imagine the "real" and "pretend" homosexuals in prison would have issues of harrassment.

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You always have to remember - no matter what you're told - that God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway."
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Life is short, live every day like its your last

Although prison scams are undoubtedly true, there are as many frauds on the outside trying to get their jollies off by writing to inmates, especially young ones. The cheaters exist on both sides of the wall. I have found the old saying: "Let the buyer beware" to be the best advice. Presumably the people writing inmates are adults and, as such, should have some degree of common sense. When states, like Florida and a few others, attempt to interfere with an inmate's right to have contact from the outside by becoming their Big Mommas, because some "cry babies" have complained that they were stung, I can give no support. There are some great people behind the walls and to portray them all as sinister parasites is doing a great disservice to the ones who really are trying to reach out for of what the religious call "loving kindness."