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.
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".
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.)
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".
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.
There is an incentive: if people know your platform is riddled with scammers, they’re not going to use it. There are hundreds of dating apps out there that people just don’t use because they’re not trustworthy.
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 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.
Because the privately owned dating apps measure their success in profits, which gives them a misaligned incentive to ensure people don't meet anyone. Its not crazy to say a nonprofit dating app wouldn't face the same problem.
I'd support a non-profit dating app in a heartbeat.
There are so many dark patterns in for-profit dating apps, it's the app equivalent of a funhouse mirror.
For one, something like 75-90% of the profiles are dormant/inactive, but they're still shown as active profiles to give current users the illusion that there are lots of options in your area. Second, a successful dating app experience (assuming they're looking for something serious), means the user churns, so the app company is financially incentivized NOT to put you in front of people that you would likely connect with, at least without trying to extract as much money from you at first. Finally, the paid accounts have gotten ridiculously expensive, which drives real users away from the platform. And of course, they don't have to be transparent about any of it.
A non-profit app has much less incentive to (frankly steal) from their users because they're able to offer the service at a lower cost, without the need for the funhouse mirror BS, and could even provide meaningful aggregate community data on how many couples they've connected, etc.
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.
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".
This one?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49916110
"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'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.)
Scammers making 5-6 figures in such scams would happily pay that.
I receive pig butchering emails and phone calls all the time.
Why would you send somebody that much money?
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".
The dating apps have zero incentive to change. Bandaids like photo verification are minimally effective at best.
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.
There is an incentive: if people know your platform is riddled with scammers, they’re not going to use it. There are hundreds of dating apps out there that people just don’t use because they’re not trustworthy.
Simply buy up all the dating apps and sites under a single company.
This mostly exists and is called Match Group! Owners of Hinge, Tinder, OkCupid, Match.com and a bunch of smaller, specialized dating apps.
I'm guessing the parent knows that.
Now I'm wondering, if one created a brand new dating app marketed "WE ARE NOT OWNED BY MATCH GROUP", would it make bank?
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 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.
Why would it be any more successful than the privately-owned dating apps?
Because the privately owned dating apps measure their success in profits, which gives them a misaligned incentive to ensure people don't meet anyone. Its not crazy to say a nonprofit dating app wouldn't face the same problem.
I'd support a non-profit dating app in a heartbeat.
There are so many dark patterns in for-profit dating apps, it's the app equivalent of a funhouse mirror.
For one, something like 75-90% of the profiles are dormant/inactive, but they're still shown as active profiles to give current users the illusion that there are lots of options in your area. Second, a successful dating app experience (assuming they're looking for something serious), means the user churns, so the app company is financially incentivized NOT to put you in front of people that you would likely connect with, at least without trying to extract as much money from you at first. Finally, the paid accounts have gotten ridiculously expensive, which drives real users away from the platform. And of course, they don't have to be transparent about any of it.
A non-profit app has much less incentive to (frankly steal) from their users because they're able to offer the service at a lower cost, without the need for the funhouse mirror BS, and could even provide meaningful aggregate community data on how many couples they've connected, etc.