"It's sort of a perfect scam," said Gianluca Stringhini, one of the study's co-authors, "because the person would never realize that they've been scammed." Afterward, of course, the bilked bachelor never hears from his date again. According to the study, these dates can cost anywhere from $100 to $2,000.
The woman then contacts a lonely heart over Jiayuan and convinces him to take her on a date to the expensive restaurant, where she runs up an enormous tab. The most ingenious of the Jiayuan scams starts when the owner of a fancy restaurant hires an attractive woman, who then makes a dating profile. And while by far the most popular of these scams - fake profiles promoting escort services - will be familiar to anyone who uses Tinder in the U.S., the remaining scams could be drawn straight from The Sting or The Grifters. The authors of the study analyzed more than 500,000 profiles, drawn from Jiayuan's 100 million users, which the site's employees had flagged as scam accounts. Ask a single American city-dweller about deception in the world of online dating and you'll hear a litany of familiar, if not particularly serious, complaints: exaggerated heights, photos so flattering they border on fantasy, and horndog men who overstate their desire to settle down.Īsk their Chinese counterpart, and you're likely to hear a much wilder story.Ī new study, " Quit Playing Games With My Heart: Understanding Online Dating Scams," a collaboration between University College London and Jiayuan, China's largest dating site, revealed the unbelievably creative and involved cons that plague online dating there.