Hacker News Reader

Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

I work on this problem at one of the world’s largest social media companies. I deal with it 7 days a week for several years now. This is my life and it’s extremely sad as to how people are being exploited in these scams.

View on HN

Why do avaiable sources claim otherwise?

Statista has a report indicating 53% of victims are men and 47% of victims are women.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1481218/us-online-dating...

Additionally, the FTC says women report significantly higher financial losses than men.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spo...

possible reasons I can think of 1) these are based on self reporting and it’s very possible men report at lower rates. 2) it’s possible that the scams happen outside of the areas where I have insights (social media)

Also, the specific social media network you work at would skew your perspective.

I would bet money that romance scam victims are overwhelmingly men on TikTok but overwhelmingly women on Facebook.

Probably not, ticktock isn't male dominated. Twitter and Reddit however, I could see that.

Tiktok facilitates primarily visual interactions and young people, whereas Facebook is less visually focused and has a much older user demographic.

So what are the ways people get exploited, or tricked? Is it a lack of knowledge on part of the people, are scammers just really sophisticated, or just one trick ponies that work at scale?

Any ideas on how to stop or how we can protect he people around us from these scams?

People don't think straight when they think they are in love. [1] In my family we've learned not to confront people directly when they are experiencing this (even when it was me) because it's a delusional state where people won't listen to you.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Love-Limerence-Experience-Being/dp/08...

I'd think Skype should just not let anybody DM anyone they don't know at this point. Bluesky now has an epidemic of 'girls' who send creepy DMs.

Why do you work 7 days a week?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com