If I was younger I would be a fool

Well Day 2 and the laughter has not stopped.  As I mentioned yesterday I am sacrificing myself to the online dating sites.  It has been an interesting 24 hours.

As I mentioned yesterday the amount of activity changed dramatically after I paid for the option to interact.  After about a few hours another flood of activity hits my notification list.  Also appears to be a few legit woman.  Well let me rephrase that, girls.  Majority of activity is from some hot 20 something that wants to chat.  Luck has it that one is supposedly in my area so I test decide to test the waters.

She offers to chat offline, not on the site.  I agree and provide my email to her (btw the email is attached to site and is not used for anything else).  Also interesting point is that the majority of the woman that want to chat that seem real are asking to chat off the site.  Also when entering anything external address in email on the site is blocked so you have to break it up so it is not hidden.  This is standard for any pay site since they want you to keep paying.  So of we go to chat on email.

Almost immediately I get a response back explain the situation and that due to safety I need to validate who I am and that I am safe.  Okay that make sense.  I am not crazy but the woman don’t know that.  So I proceed to ask how.  Basically go to a site, enter in your credit card information and then click don’t pay.  Now I have been recently notified of my credit card being used fraudulently.  Plus I have a little bit of background in this.  No way am I providing this information to third party for any reason.

So I declined and stated that I am not going to pay with credit card.  Did I mention that she also offered to pay for hotel and that the pictures she sent were damn hot?  And she was 24 years old?  I am not in my 20’s any more but I can easily see how you can be convinced that this is legit.  Hormones would over right thought and next thing you know you are exposed.

Let me step back and clarify another observation.  I have noticed that giving names out freely is also a tactic.  For those that don’t know phishing, although in this case more like social engineering, is a practice of collecting information about the person.  Once you have enough you can then either impersonate or worse hack your person accounts.  You see this more in emails, like your bank account needs to verify you and please go this link.  It seems these sites have the same problem. It is taking advantage of guys whose blood is using the wrong head and it’s just taking advantage of them.

So back to the scammer, they start to press hard.  Like it is a limited time offer.  When this happens it is a clear sign to walk away.  I even got told I could use my debit card if I couldn’t use my credit card.  At this point I stopped responding.  They made a damn good effort and for some it might have worked.  The old saying goes “If it is to good to be true it usually is.”

So in 24 hours I have identified that the site uses bots to pull you in and pay.  Along with few possible real people which also seems they are trying to scam you out of money.  The whole point of going on this site is to find someone to fuck.  If I want to pay for sex I might as well order an escort.  Would probably be cheaper and safer.  Actually better yet buy a plane ticket and go see some of my twitter friends would be money well spent.

Alas it seems that this experiment will end with a little less in my pocket and a strong confirmation that dating sites really don’t work.  I will stick to twitter where the people are real.  If anything else develops I will post more about this but at this point I think I have exposed the tactics that these sites use.  Stay away and save your money.

Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.