Does Your Site Contain The Top 20 Phrases Most Used By Dating Scammers?

Dating scammers and fraudsters are a constant threat to the online dating industry and the millions of singles who use its services around the world every day.

And with the popularity of online dating soaring over the past few years, so too has the number of fraudsters looking to target hopeful singles.

But although these cybercriminals are constantly finding new ways to trick online daters, as well as adapting their methods to the latest mobile platforms, dating companies can fight back by implementing tough security measures that can help to lessen their impact.

As shown by recent reports about the availability of “how-to” scamming guides online, many dating scammers repeat the same methods – often using the same text and images – over and over again across many different dating platforms, to try and maximise their chances of ensnaring a victim.

Recently, Scamalytics – a fraud detection company that maintains the largest shared anti-fraud database for the dating industry – analysed its massive collection of data, to find out what the most-used scammer phrases are on online dating sites.

How dating scammers can be detected

Because dating scammers use the same text again and again, the fraud detection company analyses profile text so it can spot this repeated content, but also because there can be elements of “scammy” profile text that can be detected, even when the content is completely unique.

As Dan Winchester, co-founder of Scamalytics said: “Scammers need to create relatively unique profile text, which supports their story, and often not in their mother tongue. This leads to them reusing sentences, pasting real profiles from other dating sites, or automatically piecing together unique text from collections of generic phrases.

“Dating sites and apps can use this behaviour as part of their armoury of detection techniques to catch scammers before they interact with genuine users.”

So Scamalytics dug into its data, finding the sentences that are most-used by scammers, which all come from “actual scammer profiles detected on our network”, many of which have been used on hundreds of fake profiles.

How dating sites can use the data

In addition to giving an example and flavour of the kind of language and grammar that is often used by scammers, the data can also have a practical use for dating sites – allowing them to search their own sites for these dodgy sentences.

Scamalytics gave advice on two ways to do this:

1. Check your own profiles for these sentences: If you are indexed by Google, a simple way to do this is to do a Google search using the site: operator, along with your own domain name and the sentence in quotes, for example: 

   site: www.datingsite.com “safety guidance”

   If you are more advanced, you could parse each profile for these sentences, and even look for the Levenshtein distance if you want to find similar sentences.

   (Note that use of the exact sentence does not guarantee a scammer, but should be considered high risk and investigated.)

2. Get to know the sentences: Get your mod team to familiarise themselves with these sentences, and look out for profiles that use similar language and grammar.

Check out the list of the top 20 scammiest phrases below:

Top 20 in US:

1. i am very easy going and laid back

2. i am real easy person to talk to and a good listener

3. i am a person who looks beyond what may be the obvious

4. i am not an angry person and i am not interested in someone that is

5. i am a person who appreciates honesty and a great sense of humor

6. i love to laugh and to enjoy the simple things in life

7. i am often told that i am very easy to talk with

8. i understand it is important to lay down lasting foundations for a lasting relationship

9. having past events shape your life is one thing carrying the past as a burden that sits heavily upon your shoulders is not the way i view life

10. i am honest humble simple caring and god fearing man

11. the most important thing in my life is to care about the people that i love most in this life

12. i always love to be happy in life because that is the secret of my progress in life

13. i need a good and god fearing woman someone that know the strong meaning of true love and marriage someone that is mature and has the sense of humour to take care of her family and the most important thing is to have patience in everything she is doing in life

14. i am happy with myself and my life and i like to think it shows

15. i enjoy meaningful conversation in addition to plain old good fun

16. i am an honest heart that’s looking for a stable relationship

17. i’m basically a very positive person who also loves humor and laughter and would like someone with an adventurous spirit and a positive attitude who can see the funny side of life someone who is open and willing to learn new things

18. i like to share things i learn and am open to learning new things as well

19. i like to share things i learn and am open to learning new things as well

20. an open minded person who has the fear of god

Top 20 in UK:

1. so please i want you to get back to me here with your email address so that i can send you my pictures so get back to me thanks

2. a man who cares and love my family as well

3. someone will truly give me the meaning of true love and life

4. someone who cares about me and my family as well

5. a man who will be there for me till the end of time and someone who will never ever let me go

6. someone who’s willing to accept and love me for who and what i am

7. i’m looking for a man whom i can trust my whole life with

8. i want to share my life with a strong independent and sweet man who can match my sensuality my passion and my love for life

9. i love to smile and make the world around me brighter

10. i think i have a very nice character and a good heart which i am ready to open for a special person

11. i would like to build serious relationship based on love and trust

12. i have a very good character and family values which i am sure will help me to find my soul mate

13. if you want i can share my happiness with you

14. i would like to see the whole world

15. i have many dreams and i do everything to reach them

16. i think that my wife must be my best friend as well

17. as you can see there is no pictures in my profile besides am new to this and don’t have the idea of doing that so can you please get back to me with your email address so that i can send you my pictures to personal and then you do the same in return and we can start from there thanks

18. i am real easy person to talk to and a good listener

19. i am often told that i am very easy to talk with

20. i am an interesting and very active woman

For any dating site that wants advice on any of the above, contact Scamalytics here.