Ever heard the old saying "You don't have to make a federal case out of it?" Well, in some cases I guess people do feel the need to bring the Federal Government into their personal pettiness. MuckRock recently published the results of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents related to Tinder and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). As it turns out, people are willing to appeal to Uncle Sam for some of the prettiest things.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Is it fucked up when you're on tinder and you see a catfish, but you immediately know that it's a catfish because you've jerked off to the porn star before?</p>— GenesisDC #Subarashii #Ningen (@GenesisDC02) <a href="https://twitter.com/GenesisDC02/status/946243444850286593?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 28, 2017</a></blockquote>
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Now you might be surprised to find out that Tinder evidently is chock full of scammers. What is now commonly referred to as "catfishing" is just the latest Internet-ready version of the classic "romance scam" which is certainly one of the oldest in the book. In addition to the romance scamming "catfish" are the "porn cartel" who spam Tinder users with handfuls of spam daily.
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<a href="https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/romance-scams">According to the FBI</a> "romance scams" are on the rise in the age of social media:
<blockquote>Trolling for victims online “is like throwing a fishing line,” said Special Agent Christine Beining, a veteran financial fraud investigator in the FBI’s Houston Division who has seen a substantial increase in the number of romance scam cases. “The Internet makes this type of crime easy because you can pretend to be anybody you want to be. You can be anywhere in the world and victimize people,” she said. “The perpetrators will reach out to a lot of people on various networking sites to find somebody who may be a good target. Then they use what the victims have on their profile pages and try to work those relationships and see which ones develop.”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Hidden among <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Tinder?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Tinder</a>'s <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/FTC?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#FTC</a> complaints is a man demanding a federal investigation because a woman didn't send nudes <a href="https://t.co/UMn5JndnYp">https://t.co/UMn5JndnYp</a> <a href="https://t.co/Qjzh2TlI7g">pic.twitter.com/Qjzh2TlI7g</a></p>— MuckRock (@MuckRock) <a href="https://twitter.com/MuckRock/status/946054825141260288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 27, 2017</a></blockquote>
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Amidst all this, however, is one case that really takes the cake… the fellow who literally tried to "make a federal case" out of being scammed out of $5 while trying to get some nude pictures sent to him. Buzzfeed had reported earlier this year how a college student named Maggie Archer was using a Tinder bio with a simple advertisement reading, "send me $5, see what happens."
Pro-tip: whenever anyone asks you to give them money to "see what happens" just assume that what is going to happen is you getting scammed. Several "thirsty" males (that's the term the millennials are using these days, right?) paid up and "saw what happened." What happened, of course, was they lost their $5 forever. According to the Buzzfeed story, she scammed over 20 of her Tinder matches in this manner. After taking her $5 fee, what "happened" was she would <i>unmatch</i> herself to them and get lost literally "in the shuffle" of millions of Tinder users.
At least one of these men decided enough was enough and literally filed an FTC complaint about the small change scammer.
<blockquote>Hello, I am not a victim however I stumbled across this fraud scam from an article on BuzzFeed promoting this scam as heroic. This is the second time in two weeks that BuzzFeed has promoted fraud as honorable. I am requesting that an investagtion takes place since clearly this is not acceptable. The link to the monetary scams is http://bzfd.it/2o9pvQR If you need any additional assitance from me please reach out via e-mail or call me at (b)(6)58</blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Scammer must be desperate if they are sending 409 messages to fax machines. <a href="http://t.co/1MyaoIWK">pic.twitter.com/1MyaoIWK</a></p>— Lost Boy # 7 (@MisterLantz) <a href="https://twitter.com/MisterLantz/status/159718050596274176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 18, 2012</a></blockquote>
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There are <a href="https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/nov/06/tinder-ftc/">dozens of cases like this</a> available for your reading pleasure at MuckRock. A good reminder for the lonely-hearted to beware. Always remember, that hot Russian chick is much more likely a grinning <a href="http://www.hoax-slayer.com/nigerian-scam-list.shtml">Nigerian 419 scammer</a> than the double-doctorate with double-D's from Divnogorsk "she" is passing herself off as…
