Web Dating: Love, Sex, Money & Crime Online
I am blogging this while standing at the ThreatMetrix booth on the last day of iDate 2010 Miami Beach. The online dating world is an interesting industry – a global industry comprised of many interconnected pieces. The online dating world has all the essential ingredients to make a great story: love, sex, money and crime commingling at Internet speed. Human desire is the engine that drives the online dating world, and online ads and money are the lubricant. Where you find love, sex and money you’re going to find fraudsters.
There is a dating site for just about any kind of whatever-it-is that attracts people to one another that you can imagine – and some that you probably can’t. In fact anyone can start their own niche dating site—yes you too can use a web dating application platform to build your own niche dating site that caters to whatever crowd hasn’t been sliced off into a niche dating site yet. How about a dating site for dating site scammers…or perhaps something narrower like a dating site for dating site scammers who read Shakespeare? Web dating has a tribal quality to it that helps makes it all work. Of course scammers have figured out that hope springs eternal on dating sites where there’s an endless supply of people, many of whom will fall for their scams.
Most dating sites are aware of the scammer element to the business and the risk they pose to their members and their brand. Scammers are their arch nemesis; I spoke to a few at iDate who described scammers in very personal terms—they really want to nail them—it’s personal. The larger the membership, the more the business has to invest in people and technology to try and keep the creeps away from their customers. It’s not unusual to hear of a large dating site with 10 or more full time fraud analysts dedicated to staying ahead of the scammers. Device identification has become more common in the online dating and social networking world. The ability to bypass a hidden proxy to get the true IP address and IP geolocation in real time of the computers visiting a website is one of the most effective ways to spot a scammer on a dating site (just ask our customers).
Dating sites are susceptible to all three types of fraud: account origination (new member fraud), login fraud and payment fraud (CNP, or card not present). The ability to conveniently and securely accept web payments and avoid chargebacks is critical to the online dating business. Payment processors and alternative payment services are a key part of making it all work.
And what’s next big thing in online dating? Mobile of course. When I asked conference attendees what their big takeaway was from the conference, anything to do with mobile was top of mind. One person explained that mobile is hot to online dating “because it gives people a way to react instantly any time and anywhere…they don’t have to limit themselves to the time they’re tethered to their computers.”
The brave new world of online dating gives new meaning to the old proverb love is blind: when anyone can be someone else online, how can you be sure that lovesyababy422 in Miami is the hotty she claims to be flirting with you—or an offshore scammer named Gromyko setting you up?
- Tom
