These extortionists are all over every dating site, not just Ashley Madison, to the point where someone asking about Instagram early on in the conversation is a red flag more often than not.
This feels like a market opportunity: an online dating website that extensively confirms that you are a real person, somehow. I would happily pay for that. With gen AI images getting really good, it feels like we're only a few months to years away from being incapable of telling these profiles apart. For now, you can still spot them.
How you would kickstart this high-security two sided marketplace is anybody's guess though, not sure there would be enough interest.
I have had to give up on Tinder which at least in my city has become entirely overrun by fake extortion or pig butchering profiles. Bumble is half-way there. Hinge is somehow resisting for now, but I've successfully reported really high quality fake accounts even on there.
I miss the early days of app-based dating apps when so much of your time wasn't wasted on bots.
I think many of these sextortionists are "real persons." That person they just arrested in Delaware was one.
There's a lot of really good-looking people that have learned to use their looks to the disadvantage of others (not just women -men, too).
I suspect Grindr is a target, as well, but folks are probably less likely to make complaints. Also, a lot of these extortionists are from nations that are not very tolerant of homosexuality, so they are more likely to go after hetero sites.
I had a great experience on Tinder and met my now fiancee... lots of fake accounts on there, but I found them super easy to spot. I only swiped right on women whose profiles I deeply resonated with- nerdy, introverted, and adventurous/outdoorsy women. Usually with simple non-glamorous profile photos doing real outdoor activities in our local region, in places I recognized in the photos and could have a fun conversation about with them. I'd chat a while to see if they were intelligent and interesting to talk to before inviting them on a date.
I don't think it's possible to fake being a deep, introspective, and intelligent person that is also adventurous/outdoorsy and people with those traits generally have no interest in being extortionists.
Basically my tip for online dating: screen online only for personality and character traits, and only later in person on a date for looks/chemistry/physical attractiveness. The former isn't something you can fake online, but the latter is.
Unrelated to my response here, but I feel the need to mention it given the context of this article: you have to be a real terrible person to be on a "cheating" dating site, and deserve whatever you get. In this day and age non-monogamy is pretty normal, just be honest with your partners if that is what you are into. It's not for me, but some people love it.
> With gen AI images getting really good, it feels like we're only a few months to years away from being incapable of telling these profiles apart. For now, you can still spot them.
There's still the old school method of getting around this -- they just use someone else's photos.
Yep, well aware of it, but my impression was that they were fairly straightforward to bypass. I imagine you would need something that's higher effort, some kind of KYC-grade process, but I'm sure that introduces a massive amount of onboarding friction for the thing to scale.
It currently costs $0.25 - $1.00 to verify someone's identity in the US & Europe, depending on the quality of verification you need. Tinder's revenue per user is something in the area of $20, and they're one of the highest revenue-per-user of all the apps. Bumble and Hinge are 30-50% lower revenue per user.
It's a sizeable chunk of revenues without much in the way of commercial gain - since the more you swipe (on humans, bots, or honeypots), the more ads they can show you, the more money they make.
They don't have to verify everybody for free. In fact they could make verification an additional revenue center.
They could make verification a paid service. Once verified yourself you can filter out unverified people. Unverified people can't see verification status of others.
Or they could make verification free for women, but the men have to pay to see or filter by verification status.
> They could make verification a paid service. Once verified yourself you can filter out unverified people. Unverified people can't see verification status of others.
Or make verification a menu of choices. Imagine if they had a “verify bank account > X”. I’m sure there’s some gold diggers / sugar daddies (and mommas) that would find that helpful.
Not entirely. It was years ago but I remember this op-ed of a woman who was hired by a company to build a dating profile on their site (they supplied her with photos of a woman the company had contracted for the photos).
The company made money by having men pay per message, or pay for 100 or 200 messages or something like that. Her job was to keep them talking, build relationships with them, and prevent them from finding out that the site was almost entirely made up of contractors like her. She said there was one man who she had been talking to for over a year, making hundreds of thousands of dollars off of him.
Ultimately, the company was never fined or the CEO charged with anything as their Terms of Service stated that they may utilize company-made profiles that the user may interact with to maintain an enjoyable experience (although said in much more opaque legalese).
Sounds similar to what's happening with OnlyFans nowadays, where customers believe they're interacting with their favorite "creator" they pay to subscribe to and to message, but in reality it's an outsourced worker in an emerging market economy impersonating them.
I imagine their excuse is that the dating apps are not creating the bots themselves, so they can deny being complicit. They can claim they're victims of evil scam groups that are very hard to fight against. In the meantime users get the impression that the pool is far wider than it is in reality.
what!? sorry, but where did you get this number from?
a kyc check costs 10-15 euros in EU - admittedly, a kyc is more than identity, but still, your price range seems unrealistic - do you have some data to back it up?
I think those are just the sites oriented more towards people looking for serious relationships rather than a hookup, eg religion/culture/status-targeted matrimonial sites. Since people are far more likely to think with their brain rather than their genitals on such sites.
Hookup oriented services like Tinder and AM rely on low barriers so people don't put much thought into things.
I suppose that's true, but could you not argue that lonely people are equally as likely to be scammed as horny people? I would imagine both strong unmet needs and desperation are breeding ground for dropping one's guard.
There's a sort of balance. By giving less information to a dating site, you might be safer, and limit how much information can get out in a breach.
And then there's the whole advertising/data collection/sharing behavior of most internet sites. "We never sell your information" (except they share it, or "use it for services" or whatever gets them off the hook)
I've also noticed that some folks on dating sites have been burned and are extremely hesitant to participate if a phone number or other personally identifiable information is required.
As usual it comes down to money. There are dating websites/apps out there that do what you're describing, and more. Typically for upper middle class and above clientele.
So the problem seems to be matchmakers don't scale + don't look techy enough ....... maybe a double ended marketplace for (verified) grannies to curate you some nice verified human matches? upcharge for culturally specific grannies, a committee vs 1, pinning favorite matchmakers etc
Would be curious to learn more about this, can you name a couple of these? As a whale of these dating apps, on some months I'm likely spending about as much on there anyway, so it would be break-even for me.
As far as I know, none of my friends and acquaintances are on there super-apps. The closest I've heard of were matchmaking services that are free for women, but the men pay somewhere between 10 and 30 grand to get access, and it's a woman running the show, keeping track of everybody in the system.
When I was in my 20s, I found all of the "pay" dating services to be rip-offs.
Everyone who was on (pay dating site that I can't remember) was also on OkCupid, so it didn't make any sense to pay for a smaller net.
Table For Six (advertised on the radio) turned out to be a scam when I went to the interview. I should have known to walk out, instead of haggling, as soon as "twenty nine, ninety nine" was $2999.00. (I later met a fool who signed up for the service, turned out they had so few suckers that only a few people showed up at the events.)
You don't need much for verification that a profile is real. Photo of someone taking a selfie while following instruction (thumbs up, peace sign etc) alongside of their other photos, and AI or human confirmation before your profile is greenlit with a verified badge. That is all that is needed to confirm human.
To confirm these humans aren't extortionists would require photo ID verification like a license submission.
nothing personal, but I see this kind of statements (especially on hn) "I would pay for this ..." but in reality, most people (as in, the population of Earth - 1) don't pay and are willing to trade their privacy/time/etc for a functionality that would cost them 5-10 ($/euro)
Anyone trying to get you off the current platform is trying to scam you. They do this so they don't lose all their fish when their scamming account gets busted, and so the original site can't monitor what they're doing.
Dating app scams are common in poorer countries that have a lot of international tourism (Colombia, Vietnam, etc). Women will match with men, suggest they go to a bar/restaurant/whatever they have an agreement with, ring up an enormous tab that the man pays for, then leave.
Last I remember hearing was about massive breach that exposed like 90% of the women were bots operated by Ashley Madison. I thought they were gone after that.
I don't think those who're actively trying to cheat are doing a lot of thinking, their libido is doing the driving and the brain is just the passenger.
I wouldn't make too many assumptions about someone who's cheating. Sex doesn't have to come with love: You can want to spend your life with someone and still desire sex outside of the marriage.
As a married dad, a few years I suspected that a married mother, at the bus stop, was feeling me out for an affair. I was both flattered and terrified.
A year later she and her husband initiated divorce.
The thing is, if my wife and I were different kinds of people, jumping into an affair like that would be totally fine. We aren't, but I don't judge people who do. (If you're religious, think of concepts like Free Will and Non-Judgement.)
(It's one of the reasons why I never went back to Burning Man, I was really creeped out when an old, married couple propositioned me and a girl I was hitting on for an orgy.)
I don't think people cheat because they are horny, primarily. They're unhappy in their current relationship and cheating is a tool to sabotage or end the relationship. In that sense, the risk is the entire point.
Trying to come up with a grand unified theory of infidelity is just setting yourself up for heartbreak and confusion. People cheat for tons of different reasons under tons of different circumstances. A very common circumstance is called "alcohol."
I think they're probably unhappy with their current relationship because their libido thinks they ought to be having sex with a younger attractive woman and they're not.
Is this also self sabotaging a relationship? Sure, but if they wanted out of a relationship then they could do that via divorce. Actively searching for a new sexual partner seems to me to be what it appears to be on the tin... looking for someone new to sleep with.
> if they wanted out of a relationship then they could do that via divorce.
People often don't know if they really want to end a relationship or not and even if they did, breaking up is hard to do. They don't just get divorced one day, there's usually years of lead up. And as people start to grow apart or to resent each other, they can act out in all kinds of ways, including cheating. And if someone is too afraid to pull the trigger and actually end a relationship, getting caught cheating is a great shortcut.
Yeah that's fair, particularly considering that signing up to a cheating site is even more deliberate than the usual "it just happened" type of cheating.
Anyone who sends them money is a fool and a coward. You made your bed, lie in it. Paying them won't make it go away. If this happens it is time to come clean with your spouse and tell the extortionist to piss off.
They're already a coward for cheating on a spouse. I'm not sure why they'd suddenly grow a backbone, especially considering the severe legal consequences of cheating causing a divorce in most states.
I still find it hilarious that people see a car with a design fault that is built into the brand which causes a lot of extra accidents, and blame the brand, but they see yet another marriage in trouble and blame the participants instead of the institution itself or perhaps the environment the institution is struggling to stay viable in
This is not as common as you'd think. I know a few couples where, only at divorce time did one find out that the other had placed them millions in debt.
> Cowardice, or its opposite courage, are utterly unrelated to anything involving marital fidelity.
Absolutely untrue.
A brave person who is unhappy (or has unmet needs) in a marriage would talk to their spouse about it. If they couldn't fix the marriage, they'd ask for a divorce.
It's much easier and less painful to violate the agreement of monogamy that you made. The fear of the pain of honesty and/or divorce is what makes people cheat rather than work on a marriage.
If you are too afraid of whatever consequences there are to be honest with someone and then violate your agreement with them, you made a selfish decision based on fear, which is the definition of cowardice.
So, anyone who avoids consequences is a coward? Or is it just when you do something immoral and avoid consequences? Is it just when you "make a deal" and secretly violate it that makes you a coward? Was Ghengis Khan a coward then? He did a lot of immoral things. He violated a lot of deals. He avoided the consequences of both.
Using your real identity on this website would seem like a monumentally stupid thing to do in the first place. But if your image appears on the internet I guess it's all over anyway.
