43

First of all, it's a scam. "Is this a scam" questions on here always are. I just don't understand how the moving pieces work.

I was approached on a dating site by an attractive person. This person's profile was full of pictures and short videos, some quite recently posted, and I believe all to be the same person.

I'm USA-based and I believe the person in the pictures to be as well. I messaged with this person for awhile but their word choices, grammar, etc. are all too reminiscent of poorly written non-USA-based email scams.

The person in question offered to meet with me after I "rated their page," sending a shortened link to an adult dating site which promised a free trial of a few days and a renewing membership at a moderately high price afterward.

Of course, I'm sure the person has no intent to actually meet with me, but I'm still puzzled by the scam. I'm guessing there's some sort of partnership here, where a person supplies their pictures to someone else, who runs the account and sends the messages. But I don't understand where the payoff comes in. There would have to be enough steady income to keep both the picture supplier and the account manager happy. Are they banking on people not noticing or contesting the recurring membership fee for the adult site? Or is there a bigger gotcha down the road?

query337384
  • 431
  • 1
  • 4
  • 4

4 Answers4

68

Seems like a fairly standard membership enrollment scheme. The person you're messaging probably has a ton of different profiles and is messaging with dozens of other people. The end goal is to get people to the other website and sign up for an account. The link they provided to you is unique so they get credits for all clicks and subsequent new accounts. Chances are, as you mentioned, the other site starts recurring charges and makes it incredibly difficult to cancel and probably banks on you not wanting to notify your CC company. They say they cancel, and then don't, or they have crazy terms in the agreement you check the box to (but didn't actually read) that says they can bill you for X number of months or some such nonsense.

Aside from that, your information will likely be sold off to anyone willing to pay for it.

For anyone else reading this because they're researching dating site and app scams, do a reverse image search of the person you're chatting with. If the photo they've shared with you is found on sites clearly not related to the person you're chatting with, then they are trying to scam you either financially or emotionally. Get out.

Reverse Image search site examples:

https://reverse.photos/

https://www.tineye.com/

https://images.google.com (click the camera icon to search by image)

BobbyScon
  • 14,104
  • 3
  • 47
  • 63
20

Off the top of my head I can see at least three ways that this interaction could be monetised;

A) The dating site may have some sort of affiliate scheme whereby the catfisher gets money for each full subscription taken out or even for confirmed leads. You click the link (which contains their unique code) and they get x amount for each sub.

B) The dating company may be using this interaction as an advertising tool. They might be paying this person directly (as an employee or via an advertising agency) to generate x quality-subscriptions a month, knowing that of those, y will turn into longer-term subscriptions. There's even a possibility that the catfisher isn't a real human, but is in fact a sophisticated bot created for the purpose of tricking you into joining the site and spending money.

C) They may simply be intending to steal your password, contact details and banking details and use them for fraud or sell them to a third-party.

Valorum
  • 1,800
  • 12
  • 14
3

It looks more like stealing credit card details, further getting you to watch some Adult content and threatening with law suite saying some content is copyright and you have breached the rules.

Some years back this was a standard Modus operandi of a firm where they would threaten to file law suite and extort money. The victim in order to protect their identity would pay up as much as possible to make it go away rather than being shamed in public.

Dheer
  • 57,348
  • 18
  • 89
  • 170
0

This question was originally asked in 2018; in 2025 the pictures and even videos of the "bait" account are probably AI generated for each new account rather than stock or scraped, to neutralize image search as a research tool and prevent suits for misuse of personal likeness.

Even one successful credit charge can make it profitable to use bots and scripted conversations to approach a great many possible targets, and a certain number of victims will not notice and cancel the recurring charge for multiple months. And, of course, many people will be too embarrassed to dispute such charges with their bank.

As with many scams, the bad grammar and red flags can serve as a gullibility filter.

(Source, in part: I was a volunteer content moderator on a dating site for a while.)

arp
  • 471
  • 2
  • 7