Catfishing on an Industrial Scale | Hacker News Reader

Catfishing on an Industrial Scale

wired.com

49 pointsisaacfrond24 comments

You always think, who falls for this stuff? Well, two years ago, a random service tech came out to my work site and, completely unprompted by me, turned a conversation about scheduling a follow visit into the story of his current predicament. He wouldn't be able to come out next week because: he was selling his house to fly across the US to meet his girlfriend, whom he had never met IRL.

This man was trapped deep in the grips of a traditional romance scam.

He went on to tell me how he got to that point of his "relationship". And it sounded like every romance scam you've ever heard. The scammer: only communicated by text, asked for small favors at first, alienated him from his family, changed social media accounts and phone numbers often, claimed she was hacked and it was her photos being used to scam other people, etc.

That day I was in shock and the best advice I could muster was something like "be careful before making such life altering decisions". But the encounter bothered me so much that, the next day, I called him and told him the truth, "My dude, you are being scammed." We talked for nearly 2 hours.

The sad part was, I could tell he knew it was a scam. He admitted to often being suspicious. He had all the pieces figured out. But for some reason, maybe hope...maybe desperation, he wouldn't put those pieces together.

I never heard from that guy again. I really hope he came to his senses, but it sounded like he didn't have much support left around him. Anyways, sorry for the long post. Articles on this topic always bring him to mind.

"The only kind of love is stone blind love" -Tom Waits

It's very hard for someone to accept that what they feel is the best thing that ever happened to them, is actually some kind of scam. Logically, most of the victims of this will have plenty of clues, and plenty of reasons to suspect, but they will still keep going along with it because of the strong feelings involved. That is what makes this type of scam so egregious.

Thank you for being a truly decent human being and going out of your way to try to help a stranger like that. I read articles like this and I want to cry because it seems like the world is just fucked up, but if we can all just show a little humanity like this then perhaps there is still some hope.

This is disgusting… the amount of emotional harm they are causing is incredible. People being tricked like this will be damaged in a way that makes it impossible to trust or connect with others. They are presumably isolated and lonely already or they would not be paying for a dating site.

This feels to me like it is akin to rape, an emotional rather than physical rape, but it will make them feel powerless and violated and unable to trust others. Our culture tends to downplay emotional trauma as somehow not serious, without realizing that the most damaging part of physical trauma is also the emotional aspect.

This should be prosecuted accordingly, every single person involved should spend decades in prison.

Many dating websites don't have a single real woman. They simply exist to lure desperate men to keep swiping and chatting to these human-bots until they realise they have been duped all along, or even never. In fact, this is openly said on affiliate conferences if you visit them, they discuss whole strategies on how to keep people swiping. Same about every other online industry, sometimes worse (literate scams as in "stealing other people money"). All except porn, that is. Porn (and webcams) are real things. This is why i highly prefer working for porn companies, at least i know it's an honest, real business with nothing to hide.

On the good side of things, most dating sites/apps won't be able to exist without these full time catfishers. Just because cost of traffic won't be paid back by their revenue. And still, there's some trickle of real women on some of them - most women i know have dating profiles so i know there are - so some people actually meet there.

The porn industry hides coercion, rampant drug abuse, STIs, rape, and an abhorrent human cost paid by its actors.

Ah the studios, they are largely irrelevant. They are not where the money is, at all.

"Studios" don't have a monopoly on porn created through rape and coercion. "Independent" video producers often are aspirational, making nearly nothing for a very large mental toll. Many of them are forced into it by their "lovers", and/or do it to fund a drug habit. I would hardly call myself a heavy consumer of pornography but I've seen an awful lot of almost-hidden needle marks and crackpipes carelessly in the background.

And that's not even to comment on the fact that many/most OnlyFans and similar "boutique" sites are operating under a similar model to this scam. There's often a real face who provides the "Content" as a lure, but the premium "Chatting" services are run by call-centers.

My point was that content doesn't really matter that much. It is the job of getting quality traffic and monetising it the fullest where the money is. Content providers like studios, are just suppliers for them. When people say "porn business" they don't mean "those who actually film people fucking" because this is just tip of the iceberg and not where the money is made.

Of course chatting on webcams is always run by separate people, it is the case even with individual models i know. They just don't have time for this. It's a natural division of labor. I built engines for several webcam sites and there is always that thing.

Enter LLMs to help automate all this even further.

Wow... this is... evil. That's the only way I can put it. Actively and deliberately harming people in an extremely cruel way without their knowledge just to pump them for money.

> “Customer service” staff don’t play a single character on the sites. Instead, they sit in a chat queue to be cycled between virtuals they occupy for two minutes at a time

Wow. I would not have thought that could work. What happens when the person they are chatting with brings up something from a previous conversation and the person occupying the virtual has no idea how to respond?

The article touches on this: the people working the accounts are required to take detailed notes into the system about the victim, notes that are made available to future responding workers.

chat history?

So what's the end goal with all the personal info they seem to collect? Does it lead to other types of scams higher up in the organization? I can see how some of it is useful to the people running the virtuals so they can keep up with the conversation more easily, and I get the point about making the virtuals seem more realistic for the area they're targeting, but it seems like they collect a whole lot more than that. I've gotta believe there's something bigger at play here. And usually when there's one type of organized crime going on at an organization, there's more, right?

So apparently now you can't even read articles without subscribing to a bullshit newsletter?

https://archive.md/gAb6l

Wired does seem to have a syndication agreement with Ars if you wait a few days for their articles:

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/05/this-is-catfishing-o...

I even subscribed for 5 bucks a couple months ago and it still pesters me. I can't seem to stay logged in. Anyways in case anyone is wondering the physical wired magazine is just articles you've already read on their website days or weeks ago on the cheapest quality paper and ink that can survive a mailing. Maybe that's all self evident for most but this is first time I've subscribed to physical magazine in decades.

I personally know about 3 projects to use GPT LLMs instead of real people for Onlyfans and various dating sites. Can only guess how many people are working on this right now.

After fair amount of years wasted on Bumble, Badoo, Tinder, even some explicitly prostitution related platforms. Achieved a miserable "success rate" of maybe just below a dozen of real life encounters. Easily hundreds of EUR spent on various premiums and subscriptions, I feel this happened to me at least few times. It looks it's constructed to be perfectly un-compassionate, sociopathic. Now the other way round... how to trigger them, piss them off, make them produce materials for law enforcement?

I noticed this as well in Germany, lots of asian girl profiles that pretend to be from a rich background and that have some sort of investment advisory team working for them and claiming they will give you some tips for forex trading you just need to register on this website and transfer money. or similar stories.

I once made a remark to a profile like that, that I might as well be talking to a hairy fat philipino. I got a barrage of Japanese text back, that when put into an online translator roughly translated to something like: "I am a proud japanese you idiot European, your farts smell like shit, go fuck yourself". So it seems I got under someone's skin there. Since then I'm wondering where this operation is based. the profiles are so similar in style that it must be organized somehow. I wonder how and where.

"Catfishing" is too gracious a word. "Human-farming" may be more appropriate.

Really terrible! It's hard enough to trust people as it is.

The workers here are approaching the qualia of ChatGPT's experience, instantiated in a role for a brief moment.

Also something something atomization of society.

This really needs to be illegal and we unfortunately need to prosecute not just the owners, but the employees performing the scams.

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