You may have noticed a recent uptick in fake profiles on tinder and other dating sites. These profiles follow a distinct pattern:
- The woman in the picture is Asian, often turning her face away from the camera
- The “woman” will strike up a conversation and almost immediately ask for your Whatsapp number.
I’m just guessing here, but perhaps the technique of not showing the face is to fool the algorithms. It could also be that the spammers have discovered a high rate of success with this type of image.
Normally, I just block them, but occasionally I like to mess with them. One day I got curious. I wanted to know what they were selling because It wasn’t immediately obvious. Spammers normally blow their wad too soon, spewing out their URLs at the first opportunity. In this case, that would be once I added them to my whatsapp – but they didn’t immediately try to send me to a shady website.
The most common scam I’ve come across is where the “woman” will ask me to “get verified” using a third party app. She’ll spin up a story about online dating safety and send me to a website that will offer to “verify” me for a $3.99 .
This was something different. They weren’t immediately pitching me a service or sending me to a website link. Instead, they were playing a long con. “Long”, in the world of internet spammers.
At first I thought these were bots, but I got one to video chat with me and I can confirm these are real people on the other end of the wire. They are not bots! It turns out the key to getting them to reveal what they’re shilling is as simple as asking them what they do for a living. The answer is that they work for an online mall company doing “customer service”. Sometimes they insist that they don’t do sales. I suspect that all this is to stay more or less compliant with spam laws. In the context of a dating app and a whatsapp conversation, they aren’t technically violating the dating site’s terms of service, since they don’t send their spam links through the dating app. That’s the whole reason to get you off the dating site and onto whatsapp. The dating site profiles cost money to setup, since each account requires SMS verification. Whatever advertising contract they have with the online mall likely prohibits them from directly spamming their links in an unsolicited fashion – therefore, by waiting until you ask what they do for a living, they can remain compliant.
This is a long-winded way of getting traffic to your website. But, perhaps it is effective. After all, I did check out the online mall’s website. Maybe they have a way of doing this in a cost effective manner, but it certainly isn’t traditional marketing. I’m not sure the online mall is even aware of what they are doing. They might have paid for some type of “organic reach” campaign. Technically, it’s not spam. If you were the business owner, would you really want website visitors who were tricked into visiting your site via fake dating profiles? It doesn’t seem like a great way to build trust in a new brand. I for one, will not be buying anything from this particular online mall.
