Don’t Swipe Right Again Until You Read About These Online Dating and Tinder Scams…
Last week, Craig wrote an excellent article about the coming online dating apocalypse where he predicted a dire future for those who dared not to get off the couch and stop swiping.
A few days ago, Rolling Stone confirmed one of his prime suspicions about online dating and dating apps:
Most of the women you’re looking at or connecting with are probably bots!
A whopping 59 percent of all online traffic — not just dating sites — is generated by bots, according to the tech analyst firm, Are You a Human. Whether you know it or not, odds are you’ve encountered one.
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Bots are infiltrating just about every dating service. Spammers are using them to lure victims on Tinder, according to multiple studies by Symantec, the computer security firm. “The majority of the matches are often bots,” says Satnam Narang, Symantec’s senior response manager. (Tinder declined to comment).
I knew the hot girls I matched with on Tinder who had exactly three pics and no profile who messaged me “looking for no strings attached sex” were too good to be true!
As you can see in the image above, these Tinder scams can involve bots hawking everything from iPhone games to chat apps to even shadier “hookup now” sites.
But this epidemic of fake profiles goes well beyond a few isolated spammers trying to get more clicks for their seedy sites:
Keeping the automated personalities at bay has become a central challenge for software developers. “It’s really difficult to find them,” says Ben Trenda, Are You Human’s CEO. “You can design a bot to fool fraud detection.” But, in the case of a number of dating sites, developers aren’t trying to weed out fake profiles — they are tirelessly writing scripts and algorithms to unleash more of them. It’s the dirtiest secret of the $2 billion online dating business and it stretches far beyond Ashley Madison. “They’re not the only ones using fake profiles,” says Marc Lesnick, organizer of iDate, the industry’s largest trade show. “It’s definitely pervasive.”
This flat out sucks–there’s no other way to put it. To me, doing something like this rises to the level of outright fraud. Especially when you consider how these sites perpetrate the scam:
So that’s how the hustle basically works: get a guy on a site for free, flood him with sexy playmates who want to chat, then make him pay for the privilege. Along the way, hit him up to join a webcam site, or maybe a porn site. Oh yeah, and then put some mandatory memberships in the fine print which automatically renew each year. And of all the guys who get roped in, how many are going to report to their credit card company that they were trying to have an affair online?
Actually, I take back what I said earlier. This isn’t just a scam, it’s an outright shakedown!
Tinder Scams Giving You An Easy Fix…
It also fits in well with the “slot machine”-like reward structure that these sites and apps thrive on. If a guy doesn’t have the optimized pictures or witty profile to attract high-quality women, how do these sites keep guys around?
By giving them the dopamine “hit” that comes with getting a match.
It’s completely empty, mind you–there’s not a real person on the other end. But the guy still gets his validation fix and lives to swipe another day.
Craig’s 100% right when he tells you to stop swiping, get off the couch, and start talking to women in real-life.
And this isn’t some sort of “man up, bro!” pep talk you’d find on lesser sites. No, you can see how these online sites and apps are literally taking advantage of millions of otherwise normal, “average” guys and pass judgment for yourself.
At least when you meet a girl in everyday life, you know that she’s real.
Or at least that she’s a “live human,” and not some bot designed to part you from your dollars.
Don’t know where to meet women? Magic’s got you covered.
Looking For a Connection…ANY Connection?
The most troubling part about all of this is that it seems like some (or even most) of these guys legitimately don’t care that they’re being scammed, as long as they feel like they’re making some kind of a connection with someone or something:
Maybe, in the future, when online daters are jacking in and jacking off in the Matrix, they won’t care who or what is on the other end. Maybe they already don’t care. Plenty of people just want some kind of customizable, convincing experience to get turned on. Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus Rift, the leading virtual reality firm, is one big clue that simulated life online is about to get exponentially immersive — making it even more difficult to distinguish real people online from bots.
What does this mean for the future of all interpersonal relationships, let alone sexual ones? Are people going to be content to live in their VR fantasy worlds for years on end? Are we a half step away from the Matrix?
While I can’t imagine living such an existence myself, maybe the prevalence of these bots on online dating sites is just preparing most people for their eventual future.
A future that looks like this:
