For a while, I’ve been thinking about how the online dating moderation space shifted from focusing primarily on tackling masses of spam, much of which was scam-related, to prioritizing individual safety. In theory, that should’ve been a good thing – but in reality, something important got lost along the way. I feel somewhat responsible for that because I led this major shift, but I did try to rebalance this a few years later. Even so, scams are still not taken nearly as seriously as user safety on dating sites any more.
Back in the early days of modern dating sites, scam prevention wasn’t much of a blip on the radar. In 2013, when I was head of moderation at OkCupid, we mostly cared about the spam that always precedes scams because dating site users hated seeing obvious spam. A site full of spammers is going to lose users, many of whom are convinced (wrongly in most cases) that they are created by the site to increase the number of users people see. An abundance of spammy profiles impacted our user base, and although we didn’t charge money at the time, so there was no bottom line to worry about yet, we still wanted to keep people happy and on the site, and for them to rave about us to their friends.
The workflow and tools ultimately led us to prioritize spam as a whole, rather than concentrating just on scams. Little thought was ever given to the consequences of the spam-to-scam path anywhere on the Internet. The team responsible for handling potential scammers was called the “spammer admins”, and the tool used by almost all front-line moderators in the company was a spam reduction tool called Spamadmin. That tells you everything about priorities at the time.
As time went on, the moderation teams became full-time, less informal, and better trained and managed. My focus completely shifted from spam and general abuse toward individual safety (harassment, stalking, and assault prevention). We still had a team dealing with spammers, but they were mostly made up of newer workers, with most of the experienced ones moving up through the safety and incident-response teams.
When Elie Seidman joined as the CEO of OkCupid in 2016, I was changing the way I thought of safety to really concentrate on dealing with individuals who may cause actual harm to our users or dealing with ones who already had. We worked on creating teams with people who could talk to victims of crimes and often help them with the cold system they would face if they reported anything. The focus of our safety teams changed dramatically, yet scam victims still received no support. Elie sat through lots of late-night chats with me about my visions for safety and he saw first-hand how successful my team was at what it did when our investigations team caught the person sending him anthrax and other nasty things through the post and passed the information to the FBI leading to his arrest and conviction. This was all happening at the time OkCupid was in a major lawsuit brought by a rape victim in Georgia who said that we didn’t do enough to protect her against a known abuser coming back to the site in 2014 which at least changed a lot in how we dealt with serious incident reports.
When Elie left to go to Tinder in 2018, he promoted me to Head of Safety at OkCupid and took my Trust and Safety ethos, with its distilled focus of prioritising in-person abusers with him. At the same time, the rest of the dating industry was also moving further toward prioritizing in-person safety – with Bumble making big PR wins by announcing innovative safety features that OkCupid had been doing quietly for years. By the time Match Group created a new centralised Safety Team – staffed with external trophy hires who had no experience with dating sites – any focus on scams had almost entirely disappeared.
A couple of years after Elie moved to Tinder in 2018, Match Group hired a new central Safety Team of ‘trophy hires’ that was exclusively focused on this shift in safety and had zero interest in scams. I had been one of the key people changing the conversation from scams toward individual safety, and I was starting to rethink and regret that. I tried to bring scams back into the discussion, but it was too late to do too much by then.
Meanwhile, scams weren’t slowing down. Match Group has a group-wide mentor program, and in early 2021 my mentee at Tinder was scammed out of $60,000-80,000 in a very clever crypto scam. There was no internal training or discussion about scams like this in a company that theoretically has some of the best moderation and user safety in the world. In the same month, on the opposite side of the USA, an OkCupid executive’s mother-in-law lost $300,000 in what looked to be the same scam. We compared messages they both received, and they were nearly identical. These weren’t just “small-time” cons – this was organised crime operating at a massive scale.
Around the same time, a surge in sextortion scams targeted Muslim men, preying on cultural vulnerabilities. Scammers posing as women or gay men would lure them into explicit conversations that they video captured and then threaten to expose them to their families, communities, and workplaces. The emotional blackmail was brutal, and the consequences, in many cases, were life-ending.
Back in 2018, my focus was almost entirely on in-person safety – but that year, something shifted. Scams came back into focus for me after reading Will Ferguson’s 2012 novel “419”, about notorious Nigerian internet scams and the crime rings behind them. The book focuses on the family of a victim who took her own life after falling for a romance scam, and her daughter who tries to find out the truth. The book was very well researched and became required reading for my teams. I started to refocus on the fact that scams are user safety, with potential victims facing financial ruin, blackmail, and unfortunately, often suicides. These aren’t just “spam” issues, they’re absolutely safety issues. But the industry spent years treating them as separate problems, forcing a staffing effort choice between protecting people from bodily harm or protecting them from financial devastation. This divide was a mistake.
It’s cold, but the truth is that while sexual assault is devastating, a scam can also destroy an entire extended family in many different ways – and often does. If someone takes their own life because of a scam, the ripple effects are enormous. The fact that the industry ever framed this as an “either/or” issue instead of recognising the catastrophic damage both can cause was a fundamental (but understandable) failure. That mindset must change.
When Match Group safety started taking more notice of Pairs, a successful Japanese dating site it had bought a few years before, I started talking to Tomomi Tanaka there about scams because she’d heard me trying to get some effort put into them. Scams were somewhat alien to Japanese culture, so users of Pairs were fairly easy targets. By 2021, I had spent three years trying to bring Romance Scams, Sextortion, and Crypto Scams into the central safety conversation – all without success, even after an executive’s family had been scammed. The new central team was not interested and was resistant to anything they didn’t know or understand. In 2021, Tomomi created a report titled Cryptocurrency Scammers in Japan. I had hoped it would gain traction, but in my time there, it didn’t. By that point, I was ready to leave anyway.
[ I also published this one on my personal blog ]
