Are you looking for someone with whom you can entangle romantically? There are various sites from Tinder to OkCupid that you can download on your phone and start swiping. Finding love online is a cinch now. Although it seems weird to find someone online whom you can pursue romantically, it is a very popular method.
However, the popularity of online dating has accounted for romance frauds. There was a 20% hike in bank transfer linked to romance scams last year, and people lost £68 million to such scams in total. There has been a dramatic rise in the number of romance frauds due to being unable to spot the bait scammers are using.
They try to be someone they cannot deceive people on the internet, often known as catfishing. It can be quite complicated to detect the stratagem manually, but artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. The machine learning system can catch dating scammers quickly and prevent you from losing your money. Here is how AI can help you identify dating scammers.
The list of fake profiles
Dating N More is a dating website that allows millions of users to create their profiles. It may not be the most popular dating service app, but it boasts that there are no scammers. This dating app identifies common patterns that catfishers use to attract people on the internet.
This site can prevent scammers from registering with this site. When such romance fraudsters create fake profiles, a neural network system will analyse the profile picture, age, ethnicity, gender, occupation, marital status, residency and language. The neural network system split fake profiles in both genders – 60% of men and 40% of women and they had slight difference in their profiles.
Men showed an average age of 50, and women showed themselves a bit younger, with an average age of 30. The study found that men showed most commonly three occupations: military, self-employed and engineer. However, military was the most popular because it leaves out an excuse to meet in person. Women reported their career as a student, self-employed or carer.
Most of the scammers reported being Caucasian and living in Western European culture. The neural network also found that the scammers made their profiles more generic by using text and more pictures instead of using emotive language.
The neural network system also studies profile picture and captions assigned to them to discover if they are original and not contained by anybody else.
It can scrutinise profiles to estimate accuracy
Once the neural system is trained to recognise all features, it can examine the profile to determine if it is real or fake. However, this can be found with 93% accuracy. No AI network can give accurate results. It is possible to have profiles misclassified; real ones can be tagged as fake and vice-versa.
Scammers can sometimes be very cunning. They can avoid all common mistakes to escape being caught. Further, it is essential to note that this kind of neural network system will not be effective on other dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid. Each app works differently, and hence there should be a unique way to detect such scamming activities.
Further, it depends on the demographics of people who are active on dating apps. For example, unlike Dating N More, Tinder will have young people who will not be very much interested in having a relationship with a 50-years-old guy.
This is just the starting. As of now, AI has developed much to identify such fraudsters. More and more data has to be examined from various platforms, and then experts will be able to develop a technology that could prevent them from scammers.
However, here are some suggestions you should follow to prevent yourself from romance scams. These suggestions can prevent you from falling prey to losing millions of pounds until a solid AI plan is prepared.
- Even though you find the other person honest, never exchange money. There should be no involvement in financial transactions. Never allow that person to access your bank account or take out a loan on your behalf. Make sure that you apply for no credit check loans with no guarantors only when you need them. Do not let finances come into your relationship.
- Never hand your important documents like passport, driving licence etc. The more watchful you are, the better.
- Some scammers give financial advice to their dates. If your date is also doing that, beware. You should not act upon their advice to invest your money. Otherwise, you will be robbed.
- Try to ignore completely to receive or send parcels on that person’s behalf.
- Search online to ensure that the person is not using someone’s identity.
The bottom line
AI technology is still to go a long way to spot such scammers. Each dating app works differently and scammers are smart to use different strategies to take people on a ride. You should be careful if you are pursuing someone romantically. The more alert you are, the better it is.