Facebook Dating Is a Wreck In The Making Romance Scam Victims

Not all are thrilled to see Facebook plan to operate its dating platform on the site on Tuesday’s announcement. Facebook Dating will be an opt-in feature later this year that proposes matches to you based on your common interests and events on the social media platform.

Indeed the news sent down Tinder’s parent company’s stocks, causing more than a few people to consider whether it is yet another dating site that needs the world. But there was a group that took things much more personally: victims of online romance scams and believed that Facebook was complicit.

Many victims who spoke to HuffPost first in July 2017, who reported an online romance sham report, which is estimated to be a trillion-dollar-year crime, said the FBI did poorly policing and keeping the platform free from scammers.

This is how it works: Scammers steal and create fake Facebook profile photos from Facebook and other websites. They use these profiles to friends on the site, and once you have a victim, they move their conversation to WhatsApp or Messenger. The assailants will ask the victim for money to handle “an urgency” after a close relationship develops. It’s usually small at first, but money demands have left hundreds of thousands of dollars cheated for the victim afterward.

It is a con game where experts tell people who are emotionally vulnerable, and many victims are too embarrassed to admit that they have fallen for family and friends. Only 15% of the reports to the authorities are such scams, according to the FBI.
Victims say that Facebook is not doing much to prevent the creation of fake profiles. Our previous reporting showed how multiple profiles were created using identical photos and simultaneously operated on the site, which could easily be identified by facial recognition technology if Facebook was careful to use it to this end.

Scam victims had terrible forecasts of the entry of Facebook into the match arena.
The moderator of Romance Scammers Exposed, a Facebook group that assists victims in the identity of pictures of theft taken by romance scammers in West Africa, where many of their online scouts are based, said: “It is a train wreck waiting to happen.” The moderator asked for anonymity.

Ruth Grover, who runs ScamHaters, told the web page about online profiles that appear to be scammers, “I’ll be party time for West Africa.”
Grover told HuffPost that Facebook has no significant record of keeping the site free of online romantic scouts’ abuse. What can it say that the company will not be so nonchalant when Dating is launched later this year?

Recalling that Facebook did not mention anything in its announcement Tuesday about security and identity checking, Grover added: “We may also close up the shop and scam the world!”

“It’s going to be more the same, she continued. Fake military profiles in masses, engineers, and physicians She called the idea of Facebook matching users specifically with people they’re not already friends with “madness… Except Facebook will bring victims up for scammers to pick up.” “That should be called the ‘ScamDate,’ because it will be like that.” It is irresponsible madness,” and added.

HuffPost told Steve G. Jones that the next Dating platform’s profile must “really be true” by Facebook. Such photos and identities were robbed by scammers and used to save thousands of women of cash.

He knows what he is talking about. Jones’Facebook shut down Jones’ account as so many women complained of scamming them. He notes, however, that at least 20 false accounts are still up and running on the site using his photos.

So how are those who register for their Dating platform to get rid of the imponents on Facebook screen and screen? Will the technology of photo recognition — which Facebook uses to identify our faces and to tag us in photos — be used to create social partnerships?
Pete Voss, a Facebook spokesperson, answered the question with a copy of the site’s policy: “We have a dedicated team to help detect and block scams of this kind and to claim to be an individual on Facebook violates our Community Standards. We have developed various techniques for detecting and preventing this kind of abuse.”

He said that fraud prevention is a “continuous improvement area” and that Facebook encourages customers to report suspicious material on Facebook.

Time tells you how safe the dating platform on Facebook is going to be. The feature certainly seems financially meaningful for the website. Facebook users report that almost 200 million people are single on their public profiles, so 1 in 3 US marriages starts online. “Through the common experiences they share, Facebook Dating will help build long-term relationships and mirror how people meet in real life,” says a company press release.
Of course, who better than Facebook, who is more familiar with us than we ever thought possible, when you think of it? Hopeful it is the right person that the soulmate is.

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