Scammers and Spammers: Inside Online Dating’s Sex Bot Con Job
So that’s how the hustle basically works: get a guy on a site for free, flood him with sexy playmates who want to chat, then make him pay for the privilege. Along the way, hit him up to join a webcam site, or maybe a porn site. Oh yeah, and then put some mandatory memberships in the fine print which automatically renew each year. And of all the guys who get roped in, how many are going to report to their credit card company that they were trying to have an affair online?
A representative for UpForIt didn’t return a reply for comment. But Lesnick, the iDate organizer, says there’s no doubting who’s up to such tricks. “Everyone in the industry knows who the good players are and who bad players are,” he says. “Eventually the bad guys will get found out and get caught. This is fraud.” But when I ask him to name names, like many in the business, he declines. “I have to bite my lip,” he says. “Some of them come to my event.”
In October 2014, the Federal Trade Commission took its first law enforcement action against sexbots when it fined JDI Dating, a UK-based owner of 18 dating sites including flirtcrowd.com and findmelove.com, $616,000 for assailing members with phony profiles. Though JDI labeled the sexbots’ profiles as “virtual cupids,” the FTC found this and other practices, such as automatic rebilling practices, to be deceptive.
And yet, even at JDI, the sexbots march on. Flirt Crowd’s homepage notes that, “This site includes fictitious profiles called ‘Fantasy Cupids’ (FC) operated by the site; communications with a FC profile will not result in a physical meeting.” By joining, subscribers accept that “some of the profiles and Members and/or Subscribers displayed to them will be fabricated.” JDI did not return requests for comment, but the owner, William Mark Thomas, consistently denied the FTC’s allegations elsewhere, despite the settlement.
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They aren’t the only ones sneaking sexbots into the fine print. Similar language appears on UpForIt, which says the company creates user profiles so visitors can “experience the type of communications that they can expect as a paying Member.” In fact, for all the outrage over Ashley Madison’s fake femmes, the company had been disclosing its use of “Ashley’s Angels” for years in its own Terms of Service as an “attempt to simulate communications with real members to encourage more conversation.” Today, that language is gone, but there’s still a clause with wiggle room: “You agree that some of the features of our Site and our Service are intended to provide entertainment.”
Obviously, the sites don’t want to draw attention to the fine print. In January, Biderman, Ashley Madison’s former CEO, emailed staff members under the subject line “this is really problematic…” He pointed out that the Wikipedia entry on Ashley Madison had been changed to include a section on Ashley’s Angels. In response, Anthony Macri, the former director of social media for Avid Media Life, assured Biderman he would remedy the problem. “I will change it back to what it was,” he replied. Biderman suggested tweaking it to read, “The sites authenticity has been challenged and proved to be legitimate.”
In the meantime, Christopher Russell, the club owner jilted by Ashley Madison bots, is now part of a class action suit against Ashley Madison. As a matter of principal, he wants his $100 back, and for the government to establish new rules for the multibillion-dollar playfield. “I hope this puts all of the dating sites on notice that this kind of behavior is fraudulent,” he says. “You shouldn’t be tricking people on your site into handing over money when nobody is on the other end of it.”
There’s a counterintuitive way to look at the success of AI cons on the Net, as well as the present and future status of bots online: all the people who got duped wouldn’t have been so dupable if they weren’t enjoying themselves, right? Bot or no bot, the encounters were giving them pleasure. It’s the same logic that applies to strippers chatting up guys for cash, or the so-called “hostess bars” in Tokyo where guys pay not for skin at all but conversation. Likewise, Tinder’s “It’s a Match” screen can offer as much of a Pavlovian fix as any IRL meet up.