Catfishing and romance scams are almost woven into our lives now.
What are the signs you’re being scammed?
Welcome to the age of fake dating profiles. That way, they can remove those fake profiles before they target your customers. Before we start: Get insights into automation rules that can be set up to keep scammers off your dating app in the first place. The majority of romance scammers are not people with English as their native language, and that is visible both in their profiles and the messages they send. Furthermore, many fraudsters are part of a bigger scam organization. This means they share scripts and wording that have delivered successful results with their target group.
Here are some examples of language and wordings often used by romance scammers on online dating sites:. Language is a great way to do a cursory check for scammers on your site. But to dig deeper, you need to look at the message content.
You will see two primary recurring patterns by reading and that private messages sent by scammers on online dating sites. Most scammers will send out waves that generic messages to multiple people in a very short time.
More sophisticated scammers might pace their outreach, but looking through the message history should quickly reveal the difference between a real user and a fake profile. If you see row after row of identical messages, it warrants further investigation.
Scammers want to move their victims away from regulated and moderated environments like the inbox of a dating site and into the wild of Skype or email conversations as quickly as possible. Read article such, their first message to a potential victim will often contain instructions on communicating with the outside of the site.
On apps and websites where communication between members is a premium feature, it should be noted that non-paying members who are not scammers might attempt the same to avoid fees. Scammers are rarely picky. In many cases, their choice will besites if they do pick a preference, it will generally be 10 or 20 years older than their own claimed age. Dating profiles carry a wealth of information scams are a great place to look for scam markers.
Profile pictures are one of the easiest things to investigate to identify if a profile is genuine or not. Scammers used to look to model stills or stock photos when creating their fake persona. You should still be wary of photos that look too professional, but scammers increasingly use stolen photos of real people.
This activity has been made possible by the rise of social media, where sites share a wealth of picture material that themselves and their lives. The female profiles will have pictures of young and beautiful women, while the male profiles dating mostly have photos of more mature men, good-looking but not model material.
When reviewing a picture that seems wrong, moderators can do a Google search to see if the images show up somewhere else. Scammers will often reuse lesbian dating sites philippines are multiple dating sites, and a quick search will often reveal if a picture is stolen from an unsuspecting person.
Romance scammers are trying to sell a dream as fast as possible. Profile descriptions can vary, but a few things can be found in most romance scam profiles.
Occupation is a description that is vital to spot a romance scammer. The scammers often use their claimed profession as part of their scheme to lure money out of potential victims. A very common ruse that scammers use to get money out of their victims is claiming that they are stuck in a contract and need money to buy their way out. Female profiles are a bit more varied. Dating gives scams an excuse for being overseas. A good indicator of whether an account should be further investigated is checking the IP it uses are access your site.
This will help you determine the geolocation of the person behind the account. It is scams a surefire way to spot all scammers, of course, as many hide behind proxies, and as time goes by, romance scammers get better and better at covering their digital footprints.
But we wanted to mention IP regardless, as it is a scam marker that can help paint a picture of whether or not an account is genuine. If you have a hard rule on user location, even reject content from being posted dating specific IPs.
First, we suggest ensuring link have an IP lookup function in your back office tool that filters out all accounts accessed by suspicious IPs and funnel these through to manual moderation or, if you want to take an even firmer stance, automatically block any accessed from blacklisted IPs.
Secondly, that all the words and expressions regularly used by romance scammers. We have given quite a few examples in this blog post, but you can expand on that list easily as time goes by.
Online dating scams and how to avoid them
Keyword lists will allow you to automate some of the moderation processes for dating fake dating profiles off your site. Thirdly have your system catch accounts that send out duplicate messages to multiple people. Are the accounts manually checked to investigate if they are genuine. And finally, ensure your moderation team is continuously trained and updated on the ever-evolving tricks of romance scammers. They need to know exactly what to look for to be truly efficient at keeping the sites safe.
What are romance scams?
Quickly filter moderation decisions, find refusal reasons, and track actions by agents. Talking to strangers online, what could possibly go apologise, active dating sites casually Sites Talkomatic to modern online chats, we take a look at how they have shaped communication.
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