Single people willingly scam other singles

Leaving the hardcore scammers who try and steal your savings aside, there are a lot more sinister activities being done by all throughout the current dating and social media environment that are not being dealt with in a serious manner.

The major scam is the fake profiling (cat fishing), where someone steals a photo online and registers on a site and pretends to be someone else.  They then proceed to lure people into their fake world and initiate their hidden agenda.  In Europe today this is not a crime and has no penalty.  The GDPR rules also hinders the victim when seeking answers from the service where the fake profile originated.

The other serious scam on dating services is kitten fishing where a person lies about their personal details to make themselves seem a lot better than in real life, like setting their age 10 years younger, height higher, weight lower, education higher, personal interests more interesting, and photos of themselves 15 years younger.  This may seem harmless enough to an outsider but is wasting so much time for especially men that it’s rapidly becoming a major issue (termed Lollygag dating – stringing someone along with a lie until you finally meet only to waste the other person’s time and money).

Underage people are not allowed into nightclubs by law in order to protect them from harm, so why are people allowed on dating and social media services without some type of identification review and system checking?  People are looking for love and posting the private details in this cesspool of lies, deceit, and outright dishonesty.  The EU needs to set rules and guidelines for these popular services as these “fishing” activities have left people murdered from sites like Craigslist(*), Facebook(#), Tinder(+) and others to where it is today on our doorsteps in Ireland with the murders in Sligo.

Katch www.katch.ie is the only dating service that performs video profile checks on all members to combat against cat and kitten fishing – enabling all to socialize in a face to face multimedia environment to produce real connections.

Industry References

* https://www.irishtimes.com/news/teen-gets-life-for-craigslist-murders-1.748025 

# https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/mar/08/peter-chapman-facebook-killer and https://www.thesun.ie/fabulous/8672780/facebook-dating-man-seven-dwarfs/amp/

+ https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/nyregion/tinder-killing-danueal-drayton.html