POF : Old accounts taken over by bots?
Sorry if this has been posted about before. I was on POF last year and recently rejoined. I used to be good at spotting bots — they usually had something overtly sexual in their profile or their username was a woman’s name followed by a random string of numbers.
What I’ve noticed lately is a lot of profiles that seem legitimate are bots in disguise. They feature real photos of people in my city, well-written bios and their usernames aren’t just randomized. It’s annoying spending some time to message someone you think is genuine only for them to message back with email addresses and phone numbers that are obviously part of a scam.
Did they used to be real profiles that have been hacked and taken over? Or are scammers putting in a lot more effort now?
By. IndiscriminateRacist
Funny you should mention this… Today I saw what appears to be a real profile, lots of photos, detailed profile.. I swiped right and matched.. so I figure I’ll message her (I rarely message first, I also know how to spot a bot).. she has a paid subscription and it says I can’t message her unless I have a paid subscription.. go figure. Here’s the kicker, a different woman matched with me, so I figured I’ll message her.. guess what.. same thing! POF is definitely using ta6ke profiles to get guys to sign up. No thanks! Match.com does the same thing.
It’s an arms race between the site and the scammers.
Scammers are getting better all the time. Those are probably fresh scam profiles, not hacked accounts.
I had one earlier that did this. Looked very similar to my personality type, real pictures, and sent a short but non bot message. So I reply. Their response like 30 minutes later i got a bot link.
I was contacted by the profile of a person that I had gone on a date with that did the bot « hey there 🙂 »
I didn’t reply and by morning it was deleted.
Maybe bots are cloning existing profiles and getting accounts by slightly modifying the existing accounts name Eg princess_86 becomes princess_72