Even if your match verifies their identity, you cannot be sure. It furthermore marks you as a scammer!
Yes, yes, I know. You’ve watched Tinder Swindler and vowed never to get catfished. Good for you. No, really. I mean it! Good for you. That’s the right attitude to have. There are scammers on the dating apps, and I’ve run into a ton of them. However, asking for “verification” is entirely useless, and taking it a step too far.
The vast majority of scammers are not terribly bright. You can easily spot them by their profile, or by the way they chat. They want to scam you quickly, so they will not put up anything that might turn you off. Their profile will be empty or bland. “People say that I’m a happy, generous and considerate woman. I want to find my man!” Nice, but I really haven’t learned anything about you with this. No one is going to go on a dating app and say that they are a complete dirtbag, will they?
What about those scammers who are masterminds at scamming? I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but asking for verification won’t allow you to distinguish a mastermind who really wants to catfish you from a genuine individual. Masterminds have the resources to give themselves a fake online identity. As I recall, the scammer in Tinder Swindler had a fake online identity.
“Oh, but my system works. All the people that chatted with me on the dating apps, that I’ve verified, and that I’ve met in real life, turned out to be real!”
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, again. Your success rate is because the folks who really want to meet with you in real life, are not, generally speaking, scammers. They are genuine. I’m starting to lose count, but I’ve met several people over the past two years, with whom I had a date, and was intimate. I did not verify any of them, and none of them were scammers.
I did go on a date, with a girl who I now think was most likely a scammer. She was afraid of me! I’m not a threatening or imposing man. Still, I figure that she thought I was blustering with my assertion that I’m a Dom. Far from it. I’m really a Dom, not a domineering Dom, but a Dom nonetheless. When she realized that I was the real deal, she tried to sabotage our date. She had no clue about what to do with me. She was unsuccessful at sabotaging the date, but that’s the only time I saw her.
I’ll note here that I never felt her to be a threat to my life, or my wallet. Our date was in a public place.
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What I’m saying is that your verification test adds nothing to your safety. There are easy ways to figure out those scammers who are idiots. Those who are masterminds, you won’t be able to figure out. In the meantime, you’re just annoying those people who are genuine. Good for you if they accept to go through your hoops.
If they don’t, then…
That’s where you run into problems. Some of us don’t maintain a digital presence, at all. Some of us don’t maintain a digital presence on the popular apps. If someone asked me to verify my existence now, I could point them to my identity as Your Autistic Life. However, how would they know that this is genuine? Someone could have populated a bunch of websites with fake data.
In addition, the only people who have ever asked to verify my identity were scammers. Yes, every single one of them. I’ve had two of them threaten me with sending porn to my followers on Facebook. I still had a Facebook account back then. I did give my handle to one of them, but the second managed to get it by herself, probably due to an information leak somewhere. A third one tried to pull that verification nonsense on me, when I refused, she went “OMG! You’re fake! I knew it!” She probably wanted me to backpedal, but I did not. She got booted for her troubles.
Scammers typically do not want to actually meet with you in real life. Meeting you is a complete waste of time. What they will do is chat with you for a while, and, at some point, they are going to ask for money, Yes, it is this simple. At some point, I was regularly matching with girls who wanted a date. We’d set a date, then, the day of the date, they’d say that they needed gas money or some other nonsense. They want to get money out of you, even before you meet.
The type of scammer in Tinder Swindler is sophisticated. Your requests for verification won’t reveal him. Don’t accept to send money to people you do not know well. I have a policy, which I follow, to never send money to people prior to a first meeting, and even after a first meeting, it is not a done deal that I’m going to give them money just because they ask.
Now you know what the lowdown is. Please stop asking for verification. It is useless.
If you want to know about how to spot scammers, I’ve written about it in this article:
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