Many people on dating apps are so lonely that anyone who can pretend to be interested, friendly can easily manipulate a lonely person into falling for them. Basically, the scammers are using the same techniques that con-men use to fleece their marks.
I got so many bots and romance-scammers that I quit all dating apps years ago.
Trapped in a foreign country because their credit card got stolen and now they have no money.
Needing help to pay for a lawyer to deal with their mother's estate but they'll pay you right back after.
They want to send you an expensive gift but the item is stuck in customs so can you just help them with releasing it.
Why do people fall for it? All examples are based off real requests real friends have made from me.
For example, the "hang up, look up, call back" rule (or analogous rules if you are texted/emailed) is simple to remember and prevents the vast, vast majority of cases where a scammer is contacting you while pretending to be someone else (your bank, the IRS, etc.) While that wouldn't prevent this particular dating scam, there are other simple rules that could prevent these scams.
Scammers take advantage of human social instincts that developed over millennia and were based on face-to-face contacts. That's no longer viable in a remote contact world, so people need to be educated specifically on how to curb their natural instincts.
I'm sure someone smarter than me could poke holes in the above idea, or make it better, but look at the state of things now. We hand over all sorts of sensitive data to private companies, who have fundamentally misaligned incentives. I would think some sort of non profit app would have to be better.
Maybe the least-bad solution would be a low, gov't-mandated level of effort, combined with blunt disclosures of what that did, and didn't cover?
But they conveniently forgot to mention now it is a ghost town with sooooooo many bots and scam accounts and, like in the local case, many of the actual human accounts are just selling so-called "content".
Simulacra•50m ago
baron816•40m ago
HPsquared•34m ago
akellermann•28m ago
garciasn•25m ago
> In total, Mary said she sent the man about $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments. After realizing he was a scammer, she blocked his number. He would then switch phone numbers and contact her again.
If this works anything like a real-world scenario, the scammer would connect with the mark in the app and I could only imagine it would seem perfectly benign to the app. The scammer and mark would connect off-app and then the scam would continue and get deeper.
I haven't used dating apps in 2.5y, but when I did, it was already incredibly annoying to get logged in due to the barriers they had in place (phone, social accounts, etc). At what line does an organization's responsibility end and a person's own personal responsibility begin?
I don't recall having any spam or scammers interact with me when I used them, but I have the wherewithal to detect when something is scammy. This is happening all over the Internet (LinkedIn / SMS / Email scam jobs). If anything, perhaps Congress should be working on ways to educate the public through PSAs that aren't political pieces attempting to shore up a failing leader and instead shore up the public's ability to learn how to stop the scams from swindling them out of a ridiculous amount of money.
Tangurena2•13m ago