Scams

Thanks to Tinder and online dating, there is a bit of a gap between communicating with someone online and actually meeting them in person – IRL if you will. For instance, let’s say you match with someone you find attractive, and then send her a message. She responds right away, and you have a good text/ message rapport. So you decide to ask her out for a drink. Suddenly, she is busy with work, is out of town, and has no time right now to meet.

You feel your hopes deflating with each excuse. It is disappointed to get emotionally invested in someone online, only to have them flake out when it actually comes to the date. Rest assured, you’re not alone.

I’ve been on both sides of this scenario. It is frustrating to adjust your own schedule to make room for dating, and then your matches don’t return the same courtesy to you. Maybe she is busy with work, or maybe she is traveling a lot right now. I remember postponing first dates due to scheduling conflicts, but I quickly found out my matches dropped away like flies, looking for someone who would be available to date. And if you’re on the receiving end of your match’s excuses? Ask yourself: do you really want a relationship with someone who doesn’t have enough motivation to meet you in the first place?

If you have a little more patience, suggest talking on the phone in the meantime. And set some plans in the near future when your calendars are free and she is in town.

And if she resists that, too, claiming she just doesn’t have the time? Take heart: this is probably not a real person you are dealing with – or at least, a person who is really interested in dating or finding a relationship. This could be a scam at the very worst – and at the very best, she is someone who is unsure of what she really wants. Unless you want to end up in a textual relationship at best, or scammed out of money or emotions at worst, it's best not to even bother continuing the communication.

Remember, this is your dating life. You have the right to expect others to actually date if they are on a dating app. Don’t resign yourself to accepting an endless stream of text messages that go nowhere. Instead of lingering in your messaging app, hoping someday to take things offline, cut to the chase sooner. Ask him or her out for a drink or coffee. If they put off meeting you, move on to the next.

It’s hard to know if there will be a spark between you until you are looking at each other in person, IRL. So meet your dates.

Every week, someone's in the news with a cautionary tale of online love gone wrong. Online dating critics are quick to point out the threat of scammers, but how big is the risk really?

Apparently a lot bigger if you live in China. A new study of the largest online dating site in China discovered hundreds of thousands of con artists, and their scams are far more intricate than simply lying about their age or adding an inch to their height.

The study, “Quit Playing Games With My Heart: Understanding Online Dating Scams”, is a collaboration between University College London and Jiayuan. Together they analyzed more than 500,000 profiles, drawn from Jiayuan’s 100 million users, which had been flagged as scam accounts.

The most popular scam – fake profiles promoting escort services – will be familiar to users of any dating service in any country. What's really interesting are the more intricate, culturally specific cons.

Take “the flower basket.” In this scam, lonely middle-aged women are targeted by “attracive mid-age men” who contact them and develop an entirely digital romantic relationship. Once a solid connection has been established, the man will imply that he wants to get married, but that his parents require a gesture of goodwill.

He'll then explain that the gesture is an expensive flower basket that can cost as much as $20,000. The man will refer his target to a florist he has teamed up with, who gives him a cut of the money after the purchase is made.

In another surprisingly ingenious scam, a female fraudster is hired by the owner of an expensive restaurant. She joins a dating site and asks a target to take her to the restaurant she's affiliated with. She'll run up an enormous tab (anywhere from $100 to $2,000) during the date, then disappear, never to be heard from again.

“The success rate of this type of scam is much higher [than traditional online scams],” write the researchers, “because the scammer leverages the desire of the victim to meet an attractive woman. In addition, it is likely that the victim will never realise that he has been scammed, since the date really happened, and the victim possibly had a good time.”

It’s also, according to the study, not strictly illegal, so the con artists involved don’t put themselves at much of a risk. That's some seriously next-level scamming.

Just be glad these shakedowns haven't made their way abroad yet. Or have they? Be on the lookout for pricey flower arrangements.

Next time you think “I would never be stupid enough to fall for an online dating scam,” think again. According to an FBI report, Americans lost over $85 million through online dating and romance frauds last year.

It seems like common sense not to give money to a stranger you met online, but that $85 million tells a different story. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) had a busy year in 2014 and o ne budding crime trend stood out: the increased use of social media to perpetrate frauds.

“Over the last decade, the growth and popularity of social media has increased,” says the FBI report. “Social media has revolutionized the way people interact with others and has become an integral part of life for people of all ages. Criminals have exploited social media by phishing for unwary users to fall victim to their scams.”

IC3 complaint data shows 12% of the complaints submitted in 2014 contained a social media aspect, including online dating scams. Women over 40 were the worst-hit demographic, with total losses of $68,529,135. Men over 40 followed, with losses of $13,766,588, then men and women 39 and under, at $4,417,280.

The amount lost to romance scams averaged out to a whopping $14,000 per complaint.

In one particularly common scheme, scammers assume the identities of military personnel and pretending to seek relationships online. Once they've made a digital connection with someone who falsely believes them to be trustworthy, the criminals present convincing scenarios involving family tragedies, severe life circumstances, and other hardships in attempt to solicit money.

In most cases, scammers exploit their victims' personal information using compromised accounts or social engineering. The FBI offers the following advice to online daters:

• Be wary of individuals who claim the romance was destiny or fate, and you are meant to be together.
• Be cautious if an individual says they are in love with you and cannot live without you, but need you to send money so they can visit you. If you do not send money or otherwise try to help, they will claim you do not love them.
• Fraudsters typically claim to be from the United States (or your local region), but are currently overseas, or going overseas, for business or family matters.

If you see any of these signs, especially if you see more than one happening concurrently, beware. You could soon be contributing to that $85 million dollars.

Looking for a morally suspect way to blow $17,000? Here's an idea: purchase the private info stolen from an adult dating website.

According to multiple reports, a massive database of user data was swiped from casual hookup site AdultFriendFinder. It's now going for 70 bitcoins — the equivalent of nearly $17,000 — on the Dark Web.

Adult FriendFinder boasts 63 million users worldwide, billing itself as a "thriving sex community.” Up to 4 million members who shared sensitive sexual information with the site have been affected by the hack.

Allegedly the unredacted data for sale includes personal details like names, email addresses, and postal codes, as well as information about sexual habits and orientation. In addition to your garden variety identity fraud and spam, a breach of this nature could put users at risk of extortion and blackmail.

Interest in the poached info appears to be high. ROR[RG], the moniker used by the hacker who claims to have breached the site, wrote "I have had so many people ask me to buy the db today" in an underground forum on Saturday. ROR[RG] is also offering to break into any company or website for 750 bitcoins (about $170,000).

Within hours of the data being leaked, hackers on the forum declared their intentions to hit victims with spam emails. After sending out virused emails, they can trawl through the data for potential blackmail targets. So far there have been confirmed reports of users receiving spam with malware or trojans.

FriendFinder Networks, the Silicon Valley company that operates the service, says “there is no evidence that any financial information or passwords were compromised.” The company has hired the Mandiant response division of cyber-security company FireEye, which has previously investigated a number of high-profile breaches, to investigate.

In the meantime members are urged to update their user names and passwords. AdultFriendFinder is also temporarily blocking attempts to search for user profiles by any users who are suspected of being affected by the security issue.

"As is common with similar cyber attack events, until the investigation is completed, it will be difficult to confirm the full scope of the incident, but we will continue to work vigilantly to address this potential issue and will provide updates on this site as we learn more from our investigation," said Adult FriendFinder in a statement. "Protecting our members' information is our top priority and we will continue to take the appropriate steps needed to protect our members and their information."

Tired of meeting flaky people over dating apps like Tinder? Turns out, there’s a reason for all the disappearing acts: a recent study by GlobalWebIndex reported that up to 42% of the population on Tinder are already in relationships. And incredibly, 3 in 10 users are married. Before you start bashing men, the report also broke down information by gender, and it turns out that married and taken women on Tinder outnumber the men on the app who are already in relationships.

In response to this, and perhaps to further differentiate themselves from the popular dating app, Hinge has announced that in the latest release of its dating app, it will publish whether or not you’re in a relationship, engaged or married.

Hinge did its own study among its users, and found that 1.6 percent of them were either married or engaged, while an additional two percent were already in relationships. While Hinge wins hands-down over the high percentage of cheaters on Tinder, it still wants to do better. So in Hinge version 3.5, users who reveal they are “married,” “engaged” or “in a relationship” on Facebook will have that information pulled and shared on their Hinge profile, in an effort to shame cheaters everywhere. And if you remove your relationship status from Facebook to avoid this problem? Then you may have to explain it to your spouse or partner.

Hinge utilizes Facebook to match people who are in the same circles – Facebook friends of friends who are also using the service – so you’ve never really meeting a total stranger. At least, you will have a Facebook friend in common, which helps daters reduce the anxiety about online dating.

The new version adds another great benefit, which is more transparency in dating. Instead of finding yourself devastated to find out several dates later that your match is otherwise involved, it’s out in the open.

This might be a problem for female daters, according to the GlobalWebIndex study, since the majority of cheaters on Tinder happen to be women – the target market and primary user base for Hinge. Hinge appeals to women because of safety issues, especially those who are nervous to try a dating app, because users are matched within their own social networking circles. But if married women take to the app (and perhaps they won’t – and don’t – because they would be called out by their mutual Facebook friends), they have to go to greater lengths to hide their movements.

Regardless, it is a positive step for online dating in general to create more transparency for those who are truly looking to date other single people.

Female Tinder users have dealt with a lot of inappropriate messages from men when dating through the app – it’s one of the issues challenging dating apps today. Men are particularly aggressive in their flirting, crossing boundaries with their sexual suggestions and then wondering why they don’t hear back.

A California-based computer engineer, who incidentally met his girlfriend on Tinder, had heard a lot of his female friends complaining about the guys messaging them over the dating app. In an interview with website The Verge, he disclosed that he had been able to hack Tinder, matching straight guys with other straight guys to see how their typically aggressive flirting progresses.

"The original idea was to throw that back into the face of the people doing it to see how they would react," the hacker said.

His program identifies two men who swipe right on one of his bait profiles (one using a prominent vlogger’s image, the second one of a friend who had let him use her photos). Then they are matched to each other (since they already have the woman they were originally attracted to in common). The suitors’ messages, according to The Verge, were all “unabashedly flirtatious” and relayed back and forth to each other through the dummy profile. Sometimes, it took several messages before the duped men started to figure out something was off.

The creator of the hack apparently stepped in before things got to heated and the matches decided to meet in person. Most of them seemed very confused after exchanging a few flirtatious emails, only to discover later that they weren’t flirting with women, but other men. The hacker witnessed about 40 conversations in the first twelve hours.

It has been reported that Tinder is vulnerable to hacks. There have been a few instances of people tweaking the app to “mass-like” several women at the same time, improving their odds of getting a match exponentially.

The Tinder hacker looked into Tinder’s API and discovered it had few safeguards. “Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he said. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person.”  

When asked how he feels about hacking into Tinder’s system, he has mixed feelings. "They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he says of the users. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Before flirting with someone you just met over Tinder, you might want to ask a few basic questions first.