An online dating site profile with photo of hot chick messaged me to text them right away, I replied that I would soon and they almost immediately replied “OK, waiting”. I pursued that no further, but accidentally called them with my bluetooth. I was prompted to leave message for a “Steve” in Delaware, a different state than the girl supposedly lives in.
What is their purpose behind this? Is their goal identity theft, stealing bank funds or what? Most of the interest on this website has come from these hot chicks with minimal information on their profile, no personality questions answered and so forth.
It could be some financial phishing scam. Could also be as simple as people fucking with you for laughs. Back in my IRC days, it was common to go troll the various dating/romance style channels with “Oh, I’m a so-lonely f/18 – won’t someone talk to me?” and see what kind of responses you get.
Okay, but what’s with the urgent prompting to text them on their cellphone number instead of using the dating site messaging itself?
Usually their profile consists of “I’m a God-fearing, loyal woman, seeking to serve her man.” And most of them reside in a nearby town with less than a hundred residents. It’s odd how such a small town can yield so many sexy babes.
The phisher can call/text them personally at any time of day, instead of being tied to the dating service site, which the victim may only log into once a week.
I had some experiences with these scammers when I tried some dating sites in the past. They give such ridiculous excuses.
WTF? You’re using your friend’s dating account, with their pictures and description, or they let you put your pictures and description on their account, or what? If you’re the age you say you are, and your not “good with the internet” then I don’t think we’d have much in common.
Or
So use it more often. Is it any more difficult than Facebook?
Or
There seem to be a lot of American women going to nursing school in Ghana. I’m sure that Ghana has good nursing schools, but are they so good that people will travel all the way there from the US? I one time had one tell me that she was going to beauty school in Ghana. Now, you might be able to convince me that nursing school in Ghana is so inexpensive that it’s worth going there, it’s just barely conceivable, but who travels that kind of distance for beauty school?
I’m a married 49 year old woman and get phished with friend requests on Facebook. They seem to think I would be tempted to give up info by posing as 51 year old US Army veterans calling me " schatje" ( baby, in Dutch).
The newest scam, apparently, is that they try to have you send sexy pictures or webcamfootage. And then they blackmail you to pay, or they will send the footage to your family or workplace. They find that info by googling.
I occasionally get phishing friend requests on FB. There’s always a picture of some hot young woman and they often show one of my male FB friends as a mutual friend. Apparently when they manage to convince someone to friend them they then send requests to all of his male friends. So now I know which of my male FB friends are either gullible or desperate.
No, absolutely wrong. Every-single-girl I’ve ever talked to about this issue has no idea what Im talking about or even heard of it before. It may happen occasionally to women on dating sites but with nowhere near the frequency as on the guys side. Its practically an industry there.
I’ve had several friends get spoofed on Facebook - I’ll get a friend request and think “Hmmm, thought I had l already friended her”. In both cases someone had cloned their profile, including photos, and sent friend requests to all that person’s friends. I haven’t figured out what the point is except maybe to set things up for identity theft or to rip off your friends down the line.
Someone we basically had his life destroyed by falling for an online dating scam. Long story, but he spent quite a bit of time in a South American jail.
Plus: the scammer will probably be caught and have “her” dating site profile shut down pretty quickly if the site is even remotely reputable. Direct communication means the mark won’t have communications cut off, and might not even hear of the shutdown.
Oh, good! So you’ve done actual research on the matter and you’re not just talking out of your ass. I will be sure to give weight to your expert opinion what with your exhaustive “Every-single-girl I’ve ever talked to” controlled data analysis.
As others pointed out, there’s a number of potential scams, could be looking for money, for personal information to steal your identity, to blackmail you, or maybe just for grins and giggles. The whole point of quickly jumping off the dating site is to make sure they don’t lose their mark. The fake profiles disappear faster and faster. I’ve literally seen ones where I see I got a like or a message and the profile is already gone 10 minutes later. If they can get you to text them or use yahoo chat or whatever, they can keep working you, send you more pictures, and do whatever else they need to to complete whatever scam they’re trying.
And, sure, it seems to me that women are less likely targets as, after all, many get swarmed with “hey baby” messages already, so they’re going to get lost in the noise. But that said, I have known women who’ve been scammed, though admittedly, the ones I know were middle aged and divorced. I’ve never met a 20 or 30-something that’s been a scam target, but I’m sure they’re out there.
So it’s exclusive to males and it’s absolutely wrong that it happens to women, and somehow I could find information about it in seconds and know plenty of women who’ve received the kind of attention described in the wikipedia article on online scams.
It happened to a close friend of mine twice in row. She connected with a guy on POF, they spent a month or so exchanging increasingly personal messages and then…BAM… he hit her up for a large sum of money.
She cut him off immediately and reported her to the site.
Then she met another guy on the site and the same thing happened.
She is an older woman in her late fifties. She’s overweight and , objectively, not very attractive. But IRL - there’s something about her and she’s always had lots of boyfriends. So she’s not desperate but apparently these scammers peg her as an easy mark.