US report details extent of 'devastating' dating-app scams

I recall a post here on HN from a few days or weeks ago where someone said they wished online dating was like in 2010-2012 okcupid, and someone else replied that it still worked that way.

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".

In my opinion, the real scam, at least when I was on the apps a while ago, was that scammers put up very legitimate looking profiles, gather likes and paid superlikes, match everyone back, and change their profile to point to an Instagram or Snapchat account. Those superlikes are never refunded, and I suspect there is a reasonable class action to be had.

Reminds me of a local interview they did with someone whose job is to investigate these scams. It was both fun and tragic to listen to.

The biggest problem he has is convincing the target they've been a victim. Repeatedly, they've intercepted the money and returned it to the victim. The victim gets really upset that their loved one isn't getting the money. They show evidence that the recipient is a scammer, and involved in multiple romances, but the victim refuses to believe the officials.

He said it's very common that they'll quickly send the money again using alternate channels.

The amounts are huge. $100K isn't a large outlier.

The dating apps have zero incentive to change. Bandaids like photo verification are minimally effective at best.

An interesting aside to the dating app discussion - religious institutions discourage - implicitly or explicitly - dating within the community. I’m 34 (like literally able to start a family) and one of my pastors told me they prefer people didn’t because it’s “messy”. Statistics state that only 3-4% of couples meet at religious events now.

My guess is a liability concern because churches don’t want to be blamed if things go sideways or risk having to deal with people living together before marriage (statistically almost no Christians are abstinent anymore and the purity culture mentality hasn’t really left the scene)

I'd like an email system where it costs a penny to send an email. That would make the mass email spams & scams unprofitable. (I receive well over a hundred emails a day.)

Why would you send somebody that much money?

I receive pig butchering emails and phone calls all the time.

Con artists have been fleecing people since before there were railroad trains for them to skip town on. While I'm sure the dating apps could do far more to discourage scams, there simply is no viable level of effort on their part which would fix things. (And the more that they did, the higher the "it was reasonable to assume that..." threshold, for vulnerable people regarding random strangers on the platform as trustworthy.)

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?

I find it a bit unfortunate. The scammers have some fairly rare and valuable skillsets. They're able to get a complete stranger to fall in love with them, send money repeatedly all without ever meeting in person. This requires the ability to build rapport quickly, fairly accurate and deep emotional reading, the ability to establish trust.

These seem like skillsets that can be leveraged in legitimate jobs or businesses fairly lucratively.

"In total, Mary said she sent the man about $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments."

I feel for this person, I truly do....but....seriously!?

I think it sucks the we don't provide comprehensive "scam education" in schools. The effects can be devastating but the rules to prevent them are actually quite simple (I really hate the common framing of "look, anyone can be a victim" - it makes it sound like these scams are hard to prevent when they're usually not).

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.

Given the steep fall in relationship formation, and birth rates, I honestly think the government should spin off a non profit org that runs it's own dating app. Make it independent of the government, like the federal reserve, require people to upload their drivers license or other docs to prove who they are (Yes, yes, privacy concerns, people smarter than me will have to figure out how to address this). Allow people to report bad behavior and give out bans for egregious stuff. Heck, maybe auto enroll folks unless they opt out. That would solve the gender disparity.

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.