Are you being scammed on dating apps or even LinkedIn or ResearchGate???

Are all social media and dating apps and even professional social networking sites like LinkedIn and ResearchGate filled to the brim with scammers? It seems that you will get these random messages from strangers. So this is the experience I got recently on ResearchGate which is a social media site for professional research. I expect this sort of thing on dating apps, but not professional social networking sites. This is how it went:

It starts out with an attractive female Asian sending a message. Why always Asian women? Is there that much “yellow fever” that this is what scammers prefer? So, red flag #1 is contact from an attractive Asian woman, may even be listed in your area. They then start off with a very generic opener:

“Hello, I read your thesis and the major you studied, and I think you are very talented. Can we talk? I am not a headhunter.”

But they did ask an intelligent question based upon my research:

“Why do neutrinos have mass? How does neutrino oscillation affect cosmological models?”

So I’m thinking, maybe this person isn’t a scammer. So I provide a lengthy explanation about how neutrinos are a form of photon and do not have any mass.

They come back with a generic platitude:

“Lol, thank you Mr. Wu for your answer. Science is an evolving process and our understanding of neutrinos is also improving. Thank you for raising these points, which helps us think deeply and discuss the validity of existing theories.”

When I press her for what she actually thinks of my theory and why it isn’t accepted, she returns a neat list of why theories are not accepted. To me, this looks to be straight out of ChatGPT because of the precise wording and list-like nature. I run it through the AI text detector by Grammarly, but it says it isn’t AI generated. But this is red flag #2. Not directly responding to the contents of your replies or questions and come back with answers that could have been AI generated. Although, I think this is very clever to come up responses which look like they could be real conversation.

Then she goes in for the kill by asking for WhatsApp:

“I don’t use researchgate often. If you have WhatsApp, please leave your number and we can add contacts to keep in touch.”

This is definitely red flag #3 — asking to take the conversation off the platform onto WhatsApp. The reason why they do this is because they are going to get marked as a scammer soon, so they need to take you off the platform in order to further victimize you without interruption. It is also a fully encrypted platform that law enforcement cannot access. I am really suspicious now, so I start the question game to determine if this is a scammer. So I reply:

“I don’t normally communicate through WhatsApp with people I haven’t met. There are too many scammers on WhatsApp, so I prefer we keep our communications on this platform.”

She continues to try to contact with “how are you” to see if I’m still on the hook and I reply back basically accusing her of being a scammer:

“It just might be the dating apps, but these apps are filled to the brim with scammers and they always try to take you off platform to WhatsApp and you can never actually meet these people, but it is a game to ask them questions to determine if they are real or fake. Your answer with a neat list of reactions looks like it could have been generated by ChatGPT. So, I’m not sure if you’re real either.”

Her reaction: “Since you don’t believe me, I have nothing to say.

My final message: BINGO — scammer.

DING, DING, DING game over — you’re a scammer.

As soon as the scammers see that you won’t go off platform or are calling them out, they immediately bail. They can be very convincing and are partially acting as if they were a real person. This scammer is probably talking with 100s of people at a time and I find it hard to believe that they can put in enough effort to customize their responses so it looks half reasonable. ChatGPT is probably helping them a lot. But as with dating apps, the ultimate “tell” is that they will never do an actual meetup or video chat. So if you want to cut to the chase, ask them for a video chat or meet in person, they will never do it. I’m not sure of what their end game is, but remember — never ever send money to someone you haven’t met in person.