jaylar
Considering the Scott Grant scam on Dating sites, I wanted to see if there were ‘clues’ an average person could pick up.
Joining the dating site I caught a lot of interest as my profile and image were designed to do. I had used a false name, age, image, everything set to attract the ‘Scott Grant’ type.
I got a lot of attention.
There were those would wrote simple things a normal person would, There were others who would write as if we had known each other a decade.
I would post something bland and there were those who would respond as if I had said something that needed explanation.
I posted a provocative opinion and received dozens of responses, many which ignored my topic and went into the kind of conversations you expect before an engagement.
It was easy for me to distinguish between the real person and the scammer. In fact, one guy who claimed to live in ‘Canada’ I instantly knew was Nigerian and asked him if it was raining in Lagos.
Basically,what I found was this;
the hesitant person, who takes their time, who responds to what you wrote, not what s/he wants to say and doesn’t post images of mansions and yachts (as if anyone who had a mansion or yacht would need a dating site) and make all sorts of boasts and claims can be considered.
The rest, instantly discarded.
i suspect the reality of the internet is there is bad and good.
I can log on here and be anyone I want; sex/race/age but on a dating site it is pointless; so it is there you give your details, and that is the danger
unless you are on the other side, in which case your from Canada or New Mexico, but finishing up a college degree in Africa.
That was ‘Scott Grant’s’ game. He pretended to be a 30+ Peace Corp worker in Lagos… which is why he was logging on with that I.P.
In truth he was a 19 year old Nigerian who knew how to fill his pockets.
it happens, i see that kind of scam all the time.
A person joins a site; if they know better they disguise their identity to some extent so that they can’t be tracked. But dating sites prevent that.
creating a false id isn’t possible on a dating site? seriously? a bridge to far honestly. I can create a fake social security number or in Jamaica my ID number. If i can do that a fake profile on a dating site is easy.
The real value of those sites is if someone posts who they really are. I’ve only done security audits of dating sites I have never actually used one.
So there you are…a normal person joining a dating site… it’s not like a site as this… where it doesn’t matter who you are…on a dating lying about your age/sex/ethnicity… unless YOU are the scammer, doesn’t help.
i did an audit for a dating site. of the 1200 members of the site that were paying money every year – only 11 had real profiles.
I know dating sites are the capital of Scam…
So you are telling me, Ade is in Lagos, pretending to be a 22 year old blonde blue eyes girl in Boston, named Candy who links with Olatunde, from Kano who claims to be a 30 year old blonde guy called Tommy…
Oh this double scam….
You should write an article on this one…
probably not going to, it isn’t an area of tech I often talk about. no real value in freaking people out.
I heard about Scott Grant…thinking in one direction… now… what you have opened my eyes to is a massive double scam with people planning to scam before they join.
I thought, in general, 90% were joining to date. maybe they lied about their age or financial status, but they were looking for love. Now…
What I’m seeing is that it is scammers joining to scam other scammers. So how much dating goes on?
most of the sites have local and then the global websites. the local sites work better.
tinder and other more specific apps re the new dating reality
I can grasp that global sites are more likely to have their bag of dishonest people because it is easier… but the numbers you quoted have me reeling. Obviously, most people don’t join dating sites to date… they join to scam.
sadly the numbers don’t lie, most do yes.
Thank you for that exposure of what I thought was an off hand scam, not a basic born scam.
The figures are amazing.
do note we considered a profile to be scam if more than 1/2 the information was invalid.
in some cases they were real people that lied, which is another scam.
I could see a woman of 47 claiming to be 39, although unless she looked younger would make the purpose of joining the site a bit tricky, but to go too far beyond that destroys the point of the exercise.
We found a lot more than that – most profiles had 2-3 major modifications that weren’t based on reality. Some were purely fictional, we wrote an AI system to catch the purely fictional but it misses 1 in 10.
So what is the point of joining a dating site… apparently to find a date… and lying to such an extent it is pointless.
perhaps once, in the dawn of the internet yes. But evolution has created the new internet.
Tik Tok, Tinder, and others have changed how younger folks interact (pre-dating). now the reality is the focused sites.
Dating sites are what they have become, from the perspective of security so is the internet.
If you’ve done a security audit and found those facts… kind of a reboot of what is going on
we’ve done quite a few, if dating sites were the only issue I would be dancing/.
My shock is that a person claims to want to find their ‘soul mate’ joins a site, lies themselves into a corner. How could that make sense? You say you are 6 feet 2 but are 5 feet 5, you say you are muscular, but you are obese….and you are communicating with a woman you think is a fashion model who actually works in the Burger King…
and then you…Meet?
It is a bad problem, it is bad on many sites actually.