Being, to a certain extent, the traditional and romantically nostalgic kind of person, I was never much into dating sites and apps. Apart from some brief sessions on various platforms for the sake of research and experimentation, I’ve never made any serious use of them. However, as with pretty much every other aspect of modern life, the way the internet has revolutionized people’s interactions in the erotic-romantic level has kept my curiosity high since the days of its inception.
Besides the obvious reasons urging people to use such platforms (be it to find their soulmate, a one-night stand, or just chatting while exciting their imagination and masturbating over their mobile phone screen), I’ve been particularly interested in other, not-so-obvious, profit-oriented uses people such as scammers, blackmailers, and the platforms’ creators and managers themselves make of them.
I’ve long known that individuals operate fake profiles on such sites for a great variety of purposes. One thing I wasn’t aware of until recently, though, is that the platforms themselves set up their own fake accounts and hire specialized (apparently legal!) companies to have them managed.
That I learned the other night while attending an underground techno party in Athens. I was introduced by a friend to a French expat. We had a talk which became especially interesting when I asked him what he does for a living. He said he has an online job in a company providing chat moderation services. I hadn’t heard of this term before (tell me if you have!).
A number of different ideas passed through my head, attempting to define what chat moderation and the task of a chat moderator may be, but none of them succeeded in even getting close to the truth. I had to ask…
It turned out that chat moderation services was but a fancy, tactful term for dating sites’ fake profile management. Due to the novelty of what I just heard striking me as intriguing, I asked my new friend whether he’d like to meet me in a few days and give me a detailed interview about his occupation. He agreed. And here’s the summation of it…
“So, my friend, what’s your profession?”
“Well, as I told you before, I work as a chat moderator. It is a 100% location-and-schedule-free job. What I basically do is sitting at home and replying to messages…
“Look, it works like this: There is always an extreme imbalance between male and female accounts on all dating sites and especially the erotic ones. I mean, if you are a girl and want sex, no matter how bad you look, you hardly even need to go to the bar. You will probably have plenty of choices for good-looking guys to pick up along your way there.
“Furthermore, they don’t want the men to be chatting much with real girls – even when there are some. They don’t want them to get married or anything and quit the site. Because of this fact, the companies need to cure the imbalance in order to keep the platform running and generating income. They do this by creating a corresponding to the males’ one number of fake female profiles. So they can keep the males’ interest alive, and thus their subscriptions streaming in.
“There comes my part. I just log in to the system whenever I feel like working, I see all the guys waiting for a reply from all the different bogus girls’ accounts, and I start answering them one after another. One says: ‘Hello sexy! How are you?’ And I’m like: ‘I’m good and you? Lol’… And the conversation goes on. That’s the thing.”
“Are you given some guidelines on how the answers should be like?”
“Yes, of course. We basically need to keep the guys entertained while perpetually postponing the meeting. When a guy presses for a meeting, we need to keep the line of you know, dude, I’m not here looking just for sex; if I want to have sex, I can go to the bar; I need to get to know you better before I agree to see you.’
“Some of them are too anxious to meet up with the girls. We cannot satisfy their needs, and they will soon drop out of the app. Some others enjoy chatting – or even, due to being married or any other reason, they are there for chatting alone. They are the sites’ ideal clients.”
“And how did you find this job in the first place?”
“It was recommended to me by a guy I knew in Estonia who did it already. He sent me over the link, I applied, I was hired… That was all.”
“Is it mandatory to have a direct link to the company for getting hired?”
“No, it’s open on the internet. They have a website where anyone can apply. It’s a perfectly legal company based in England.”
“Legal? Isn’t there any law prohibiting to be faking a personality?”
“Basically… no.”
“Do you enjoy this job?”
“Yes, quite much. It can be fun. I hear lots of funny stuff from our clients, and I also get to speak to them about my own vices and perversions; things I could not easily say to anyone in person. They tell me about their fetishes, and I tell them back about my own kinky experiences in bed, reversing, of course, my role as if I were my girlfriend. Anyhow, it allows me to work whenever and wherever I want, and I get fairly well paid for it.”
“How much do you earn for doing this?”
“I get paid on a per-message basis. I earn €0.09 for every answer I send. The best money is in the evenings and weekends when most of the guys are online chatting, and there’s a constant stream of pending replies. During rush hour, if you are productive enough, you can type at least 100 answers per hour, thus securing a €10 hourly wage. I usually work 2-3 hours every evening, but I miss the weekends because I party too much. If I wasn’t partying and was a little more focused, I could easily clear a €1.500 salary out of messaging alone. I forgot to mention I’ve also got a morning side-gig with the same company, taking up phone calls for the dating site’s customer service.”
“Can it then be that the same guy who chatted with you last evening, taking you for that busty Latin girl in the profile picture, might call in the morning to complain about her behavior?”
“No, not really. The customer service supports only financial issues. But it can theoretically be that the same guy who was yesterday writing to me about his kinky fantasies calls me up in the morning to complain about an overcharge on his credit card… You never know.”
“So, if I get it right, any of the employees can take up any of the fake accounts at any moment. Wouldn’t it be more efficient if each individual employee was responsible for one or a few unique girls’ profiles?”
“Yes, precisely so. Once you log in to the system, you will see a complete list of all the messages waiting for a reply. The first available employee will rejoin.
“It could, indeed, be more practical if we could take up specific profiles. This way, we could sustain coherent conversations with the clients from start to finish and increase their engagement with the site. On top of that, it would also be more fun for me as an employee…
“But I suppose it would be challenging to manage. Since we work on a free-schedule basis, it wouldn’t be easy to keep the conversation running with the clients. It wouldn’t be good to let a client waiting for a reply for a whole week, for example. But nor do we need to communicate with them too frequently. When they pay, let’s say, a €30 monthly subscription, and each message they receive costs €0.09, if you send them more than 300 messages in a month or 10 in a day, you are in the red.
“I believe there must be an algorithm in place to take care of this; showing, hiding, and prioritizing messages to be answered accordingly for maximizing profits.”
“Do you and each one employee of the company work for only one site? Or can you take up profiles across multiple sites?”
“Each employee gets assigned to work for one site only. I, for instance, work for a French-language erotic app. The company serves a great multitude of dating and erotic sites in many different languages, who are the ones creating the fake profiles in the first place. Our company only provides them with the appropriate staff to manage them.”
“I assume the profiles are created strategically according to statistical research…”
“Of course. They know their male clientele very well. They set up accounts according to demand. They throw in profiles of diverse nationalities, ages, personalities… All the range is covered: from the super-sexy, exotic girl with the lecherous pictures to the Puritan Christian girl looking to start a big traditional family… You name it.”
“And what about the girls’ pictures? Do you know where they come from?”
“No clue. They may be downloading them from Google. They may be buying them from stock repositories. Some profiles have only one picture; some others have many… I get paid to write messages. Wherever the pictures of the girls I feign come from… nothing I care to know.”
“Does your company also serve mainstream dating sites like Tinder or Badoo?”
“I assume they do. Knowing all the company’s contracts is none of my business. If not they, however, someone else does for sure.”
“Has it ever crossed your mind to try to earn some extra cash by insidious means? Like in: How are you pretty? – So-so. The thing is that my mother needs to undergo a serious operation, and I have to work the whole time to cover the expenses.”
“No, no, definitely not. That would be straight-up fraud. That’s left to the Nigerian scammers; they’re experts in this. The company would never allow such a thing to happen, lest they fancy being shut and prosecuted. They monitor all conversations closely. Everything is recorded to make sure employees do not cross the line.”
“Speaking about scammers, there must be plenty of their kind hanging out in these apps, eh?”
“Even when I operate my real profile, looking for girls, I haven’t run into any myself. They most often need to pay for registration, and that deters them from trying. The platforms also do their best to keep such pricks out. Once they appear, it doesn’t take long until they are discovered and deleted. Still, there are loads of unserious apps allotting a consistent field of action to them, too.”
“Can you recount some funny or anyhow unusual conversations you’ve had with your clients?”
“Phew, there are countless. Let me tell you about two cases I remember…
“First, there are the copy-paste guys. They will start a chat with each and every girl on the site by saying the exact same thing. They are demanding clients. I will initially reply to them from a few different profiles, but I will soon need to start ignoring them, running out of ideas. I mean, how many distinct answers can one give to the same question? They’re left to those of my colleagues with a richer sense of imagination.
“Then, I remember that guy who was asking all girls whether they’d want to…” – hm, how to put it? Penetrate his anus would do decently, I guess – “…with a penis belt. I answered him through quite a few profiles. He was Swiss, around forty years old. At one instance, I asked him whether he also likes doing it, besides getting it done to himself. ‘Yes,’ he said. He does it regularly but has never found a girl who agreed to do it to him. He has asked his girlfriend, but she categorically refuses to do it. That’s why he’s on the site.
“I have also heard of golden showers, coprophilia, and pretty much any fetish you can imagine or not.”
“Can you be sure that that Swiss guy or any other guy goes online by his true identity and not an alias?”
“Most of them go with real profiles, I suppose. Some surely use fake ones, too. It never bothered me much to know. Whether real or not, they pay the site to pay the company to pay me €0.09 per message. That’s all there is to care about from my end.”
These I think were some interesting insights from an insider on how the electronic dating industry works. Have you been using dating platforms yourself? If yes, will this story affect the way you use them? Let us know below…
The story you've just read is a part of my "Real Stories of Real People" collection, wherein I narrate my encounters with various remarkable characters I've run into while traveling around the world. The entire collection is published on my blog and may be read here. But if you'd like to get them with you to the beach in your ebook reader or as a physical book, and very appreciatedly support my creative activity, go ahead and grab your copy from Amazon for the cost of a cup of coffee.
