I absolutely feel for 'Mary', but to get sucked into a $100K in fraud over a period of time seems to only be something an app could possibly control for.
> 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.
Dating apps are only interested in making people pay. As long as the bots and scammers are willing to pay one or 2 months subscription, the apps are never going to change because that would reduce their "numbers" and make Wall Street anxious.
They are good at convincing you that they have some immediate financial need.
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.
Having known scam victims here & there since before there was an internet - the short answer is that some people's heads are just wired differently. In a high-enough-trust society, they may be model citizens. But watch 'em interact with a shyster, and you'll understand the old saying about "a sucker born every minute".
They start with a trivial amount and build from there. Each time, it's emotionally harder for the victim to accept the romance they built in their minds does not exist, AND the money they paid was not spent on a good cause.
It's much easier to deceive a person when their subconscious is collaborating with the scammer.
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.
Exactly -- there are precious few, if any at all, problems, communicated by a remote person, that are only solved by immediately and unquestioningly transferring a sum of money. Learning about specific scams is a waste of time and you'll always be one step behind. People need to learn how to apply a heuristic.
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.
Even a non-pathological dating app might not move the needle as much as you want. Like with image-based social media, a decent portion of women using dating apps are looking for attention and validation, and are not necessarily interested in a relationship with the men messaging them.
Provoking more relationship formation and births at societal scale seems like it would require overcoming a whole host of challenges: the decline of third spaces, the absence of local-community or religious-denomination pressure for most people now, readily available birth control, and the distraction machines that are phones. A single app would be up against all that.
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 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".
The phone ones pretend to have met me and want to get together. Usually the peculiar area code is a dead giveaway. Another tell is they never identify their names, or call me by name.
Some are blackmail emails that pretend they saw me doing something nasty through my webcam. I don't have a webcam.
I also have several email addresses that I do not use. Identical scams will come through more than one of those addresses at the same time.
I hover over the response link, and it's to some bizarro domain.
Most of those “pig butchering” scams develop over the course of a few months but there are “sextortion” scams where people are tricked into sending a naked photo and immediately blackmailed… and sometimes people, especially teenagers, wind up committing suicide and it is all over in twenty minutes.
It amazes me too. Like I will certainly try to seduce somebody when the opportunity comes up but I cannot see how anybody would ever sext, like they never read
For that matters my crew in the 1980s would never use the phone to talk about, say, selling weed, and how it is the children that run Facebook would document that they don’t want to control scam ads because they don’t want to lose the revenue is beyond me. Like if you send me an email about something I could conceivably have to explain in court I will slap you in person.
I get one or two SMS texts each month from unknown numbers with messages like "have time this week" or "I'm curious - how did we connect?". I have a collection of pics they send and use the pics to respond to others. It's probably smarter to ignore them, but it's hard to resist wasting their time.
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.)
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.
An interesting aside to the dating app discussion - religious institutions discourage - implicitly or explicitly - dating within the community. I’m 34 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)
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.
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.
48 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 11.5 ms ] threadDo you expect Republicans to enact regulations???? In THIS administration?
> 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.
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.
Sunk cost "fallacy" helps the scammer a lot.
They start with a trivial amount and build from there. Each time, it's emotionally harder for the victim to accept the romance they built in their minds does not exist, AND the money they paid was not spent on a good cause.
It's much easier to deceive a person when their subconscious is collaborating with the scammer.
Also, anyone who acts too interested in me would be an instant red flag.
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.
Provoking more relationship formation and births at societal scale seems like it would require overcoming a whole host of challenges: the decline of third spaces, the absence of local-community or religious-denomination pressure for most people now, readily available birth control, and the distraction machines that are phones. A single app would be up against all that.
https://asianews.network/singapore-government-launches-datin...
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".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49916110
Some are blackmail emails that pretend they saw me doing something nasty through my webcam. I don't have a webcam.
I also have several email addresses that I do not use. Identical scams will come through more than one of those addresses at the same time.
I hover over the response link, and it's to some bizarro domain.
Yes, but I am talking about the initial opening communication.
> but there are “sextortion” scams where people are tricked into sending a naked photo
I have difficulty imagining how someone, even a teenager, can be tricked into sending a naked selfie to a stranger.
I do have a friend who responds to such entreaties with with a disgusting porn screen grab. They never bother him again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Liaisons_dangereuses
For that matters my crew in the 1980s would never use the phone to talk about, say, selling weed, and how it is the children that run Facebook would document that they don’t want to control scam ads because they don’t want to lose the revenue is beyond me. Like if you send me an email about something I could conceivably have to explain in court I will slap you in person.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/technology/postage-is-due...
I never understood the rationale for not doing it.
other networked systems (EDI VANs) charged traditionally per document, sometimes even per character.
though I mean people literally PAY to PRINT PHYSICAL CRAP and MAIL IT right to my junk box. half of my mail is junk.
how much is an email worth?
https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
I feel for this person, I truly do....but....seriously!?
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)
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.
These seem like skillsets that can be leveraged in legitimate jobs or businesses fairly lucratively.