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Lauren Goode

Business
Oct 1, 2022 7:00 AM


I UNCOVERED AN ARMY OF FAKE MEN ON HINGE

They had gleaming teeth, perfect hair, and selfies with baby animals. But could
they pass the Turing test?
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ILLUSTRATION ABBR. PROJECT

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BOTS RUN THE INTERNET

They’re a scourge! They’re a boon. They’re the automated worker bees of
cyberspace—and they influence everything you do online.

 * Not All Bots Are Bad

 * The Botnet That Fooled Facebook

 * The Hole in Elon Musk’s Twitter Standoff

 * I, Pro-Bot

 * The Search for Twitter’s Spam Squad

 * How Bots Corrupted Advertising

 * Can You Spot the Bot?

 * They’re Hot. They’re Bots
   
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 * The Trouble With Mental Health Chatbots

 * Subscribe to WIRED

In the land of love, there are fakes, and there are fakes. There’s the
realization that the flesh-and-blood person you’ve spent time with is
inauthentic in some way, the old-fashioned bluffing of the Homo sapiens mating
game. And then there are the unnaturally smooth selfies and stilted messages
that suggest an AI-generated facsimile of a person. On dating app Hinge, which
claims to serve those seeking life-long connections, there appear to be a lot of
these.

Hinge surely is not the only dating app riddled with digital fakes. The
potential for romance makes people more vulnerable than in other digital
contexts. In the early days of Tinder, people complained about chatbots that
would encourage them to click on suspect game links. More recently, as usage of
dating apps has soared during the pandemic, these services have been targeted by
sophisticated social engineering operations known as pig-butchering scams.

I’m one of many millions who have bumbled their way through Bumble or taken a
swing on Hinge over the past couple years. I never got into Tinder, because I
just can’t, and that phrase alone should be evidence enough of my
elder-millennialism, which explains why I never got into Tinder. I was invited
to try Raya, and I’m sorry to report that I have absolutely zero sexy celebrity
DMs to share with you. Hinge seemed to be the most straightforward of the bunch,
until it wasn’t.



Over the past few months an increasing number of uncanny profiles have filled my
Hinge feed. As I write this, I’ve just cycled through 15 profiles in the app—at
least four have signs of being fake. Their photos are too polished, their
profile descriptions totally nonsensical. For a while I ignored these oddities,
partly because I wasn’t super invested in the app and partly because my brain
has been coded to run scripts like:

> If (abdomen.equals("Photoshopped")){ //DELETE MATCH ASAP };



But then I figured I’d “like” these bot profiles back, establishing a match, to
see what I could dig up. Hinge itself soon confirmed what I suspected, booting
some of these supposed people off the app for potentially fraudulent behavior. I
received automated emails on August 6, 8, 9, 14, and again on September 18 and
22, letting me know a match was a fake.



Screenshots via Lauren Goode

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Some tell-tale signs of a fake Hinge profile, if like me you are a cisgender
woman seeking a man: These men have no blemishes, wrinkles, or quirky
birthmarks. No amount of Retin-A and Instagram filtering would give me their
complexions. Many profiles include a shirtless photo, and even the 40-somethings
appear to have forsaken carbs, now and for the remainder of their days. Ai,
whose name was a little on the nose, even chooses to go backpacking shirtless,
nevermind the chafing.



They love to show off their dogs or any other cute animal that might draw your
attention. Alex, 38, holds a baby lamb, while Pacheco dares to pet a couple of
lion cubs and Matthew hangs out with a camel. Also like Matthew, they are often
at the gym, or golfing, like Smith, or gardening, like Victor. It’s as if
someone typed “Chris Evans playing with puppies” into some kind of Himbo AI
generator and a million Hinge profiles were spit out.

These profiles frequently have a purple “Just joined” badge, indicating they’re
new to the app. But it’s the text within the profiles that’s most awkward. Aaron
writes “I bet you can’t spicy food.” Emi said he is looking for “A sincere, kind
and caring Days and Nights in Wuhan,” a reference to a Chinese Communist Party
documentary. Leon’s love language is to “use correct words and physical contact
reactions.” Liwei is convinced that “Christianity.” That’s it, that’s the
sentence: “I’m convinced that Christianity.”


Screenshot via Lauren Goode

Last month I contacted Match Group, the love leviathan that owns not only Hinge
but also Tinder, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, the video chat app Azar, the
“high-standards” dating app The League, Match itself, and others. A company
spokesperson, Justine Sacco, initially said she was surprised by my query, which
surprised me, since the bot problem was so obvious. Later, another spokesperson,
Kayla Whaling emailed a statement that said Match Group uses AI and machine
learning to proactively ban bad accounts, and invests in “innovative technology
and moderation tools to help prevent and disrupt potential online harms.”
Somehow none of it had touched the swarm of bots that had contacted me.

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Whaling also said that many of the company’s apps ask users to take profile
photos within the app itself, so that automated tools can compare the images
with the person’s already-uploaded photos. In theory, this provides evidence
that a person is who they say they are. But this Photo Verification feature
isn’t yet available on Hinge.

I’m not here often. I’m sorry. There’s no beep.

Match Group’s communications staff being little help, I decided to try
conversing with the bots instead, hoping to understand how they work and what
they’re supposed to accomplish.

A friend who works in machine learning suggested I lob random but highly
specific questions at them, something like “What’s your favorite dinosaur?”, to
try to trip up the chatbots. The first “man” I tried it on unmatched me soon
after. Clearly I had caught a bot. Or maybe when you’re a grown woman you’re not
supposed to ask potential dates “What’s your favorite dinosaur?”

Similarly, a WIRED editor suggested I try questions like those researchers had
used to challenge the chatbot Mitsuku: “If we shake hands, whose hand am I
holding?” and “If London is south of Oxford, is Oxford north of London?” After
trying this on a few of my Hinge matches, however, I began to suspect that these
were not algorithmic bots, but real people hiding behind stock photos and
language translation apps.

I started chatting with Liwei, a 45-year-old lounging shirtless in a hammock,
beer in hand, staring forlornly at the ocean. “Where are you from?” I asked.
Your heart, he replied. “Are you a bot?” I asked. Do I look like a robot to you?



I immediately asked if he wanted to meet for coffee in San Francisco, knowing
the chance of ever meeting this person in person was less than zero. He
immediately suggested I share my number: Beautiful, you and I are not usually
here. If you can leave your contact information, OK, so that we can get to know
each other better…I’m not here often. I’m sorry. There’s no beep. I asked him
what he meant by that, and then took a leap: “Who do you work for? Do you work
alone, or are you part of a larger organization?” Liwei said he had to go meet
friends for coffee. Three days later, I got a notification that Liwei had been
kicked off of Hinge.

Three days after that, as if on cue, Paul appeared on Hinge. He had blonde hair,
blue eyes, and large ears. He wore bright, colorblocked sweaters and stood in
flower fields with equally impressive color palettes. He went right in for the
kill when he “liked” my profile: Your profile attracts me, but I hardly use
Hinges. I don’t want to miss you. So please give me your number. He signed the
message with three emoji roses. Reader, I gave Paulbot my number.

We first texted via SMS—he had a 415 number, indicating San Francisco—and then
moved to Telegram at Paulbot’s request. (“Welcome to the dark side,” a real-life
friend texted me when he saw that I’d joined Telegram.) Paulbot was a busy guy.
He ran a financial trading company, and was, he claimed, “trading a second
contract in cryptocurrency futures.” (I have no idea what this means.)
Originally from Germany, he now lived in Pacifica, a beach town south of San
Francisco, only he spelled it Persfika, which is how a translation app might
spit it out if it misinterpreted your words.

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Paulbot liked golf, bowling, and reading. You like writing and I like reading.
It seems that we are very suitable, he texted. “The dream team,” I wrote back. I
asked if he wanted to meet for coffee. I don’t want to date so soon. I think we
can spend a little time getting to know each other, which is better for you and
me, he replied.

At my request Paulbot sent a few additional photos of himself, which he said
were from his time in Germany. A quick reverse Google Image search showed that
Paulbot was sitting outside of Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in
Barcelona, Spain. Such a fibber, Paulbot! Otherwise, his photos and their
metadata contained no helpful clues or location information. His perfectly
symmetrical face appeared nowhere else on the web, as far as I could find.

Paulbot and I chatted for a few days. I felt a mild thrill, and not a little
apprehension, with each text that came in: What would he say or reveal now?
Would I be able to undercover who or what was behind Paulbot? And would I regret
giving that entity my phone number?

I decided on a Saturday to ask Paul the hard questions. First I asked if he was
who he said he was. Then I asked if he was working for someone who was forcing
him to do this. “I believe you may be someone who is trying to gain access to my
personal information so that you can get something from me. I’m hoping you can
be honest with me and tell me who you work for, and how it works,” I wrote to
him. Later that night, as I dropped off friends after a birthday party, a call
came in from Telegram. The caller was Paul. I froze.


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Paul wanted to video chat. He tried at least eight times. I rejected his video
calls, out of fear that I might be recorded, and insisted on an audio call.
Finally we connected. Paul was silent for several moments before he spoke.



“Fuck, you,” he said, over and over again. Slowly, in a heavy accent. “Fuck,
you.” “What’s your real name?” I tried asking Paul. “Who do you work for?”

“Fuck, you,” was all he could say. Paul did not sound German, and he was
probably not in Pacifica. Rattled, I hung up and blocked Paulbot. I had tried to
peek inside dating app scams, and reach the people who feel compelled to run
them, and I had failed. Or maybe I had succeeded, if success meant confirming
that humans are still scamming other humans, from a world away, by exploiting
the false closeness we experience through screens.

I had suffered no real harm from my chats with Paulbot, or Liwei, or any of the
others, and can’t know for sure they were not benign users who had built
questionable profiles in good faith. But scammers who target people via dating
apps or other messaging services unrelated to romance are not harmless. They
have defrauded people and drained their bank accounts, often their crypto
accounts. A recent US Federal Trade Commission report said that more than 46,000
people have reported losing over $1 billion in crypto scams since 2021, and
labeled social media apps and cryptocurrencies “a combustible combination for
fraud.”

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 * 





In July, the journalist Max Read wrote about the proliferation of awkward text
messages he and his friends were receiving from strangers, and concluded that
they were originating from large, hierarchical fraud rings. “The victim is
strung along for weeks or months before the actual swindle, like a pig being
fattened for slaughter,” Read wrote, explaining why such operations are dubbed
pig butchering. The goal is to get victims to share their personal financial
information or to even start trading on a totally fake cryptocurrency exchange.
Paulbot’s end game, I suspect, was to eventually ask me to put money into his
bogus trading platform.

Even in the absence of monetary fraud, these scammers take up space in our apps
and in our minds that has value of its own. Their origins may be unclear or
shadowy, but they’re on platforms we use in broad daylight, which make money
from our taps, swipes, and attention. I haven’t “found love” on Hinge—I never
really thought I would—but I do know that I’ve paid $34.99 per month for several
months for at least the possibility of more real-life connections. Instead, my
feed was populated with fakes.

Paulbot was never removed from Hinge, because he preemptively deleted his
account. I’ve canceled my subscription.





Read next



Read next


THE PROBLEM WITH MENTAL HEALTH BOTS


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Lauren Goode is a senior writer at WIRED covering consumer tech issues and
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and app stores, the right to repair and the ways tech changes human behavior.
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