Dating app investment scams – never thought it’s a thing, but it is. Here’s how it went down.

I have just run into a scam that I never thought existed, but thought I would post about it for awareness (maybe you are already aware and I was living under a rock, but if this helps just one person, I’m happy).

I ran into a crypto investment scam on a dating app (Boo, in this instance) – I am not desperate about dating at all, and yet I got in.

Here’s how it went. Matched with a girl living far away from me, but her current location was near to me – and she had a meticulously presented story of her having just been on a vacation in my home town, she had photos (I am experienced with AI – I am very confident none of it was AI generated). She seemed legit at first, we had some good convo, some shared interests that she talked genuinely about, even talked about some deeper topics and she was active about them – so, all in all, it seemed like your average dating app chat getting to know each other, and one where we match well. We talked about what we do for work, at that point she just briefly mentioned she does some day trading, but she rather talked about a rather average 9-5 job that she does and likes. She was asking all your typical dating questions, nothing weird there.

Second day, we left the dating app as she suggested we should get on WhatsApp instead.
And here’s the first red flag – she deleted her social media profile almost instantly as we moved. I asked her about it, she said she can’t chat with more than one people at the same time, and since we’re talking she deactivated her profile. Obviously – that’s not something you do after 1 day of talking to someone living thousands of kilometers away. But if you’re naive or desperate enough, I guess you could see it as wholesome and even a green flag. We exchanged some pics, her pics seemed genuine, but I could notice that they were not taken on the same day – her outfits were different, but most importantly, her nails were different colors in the morning than in the afternoon, while supposedly she was working the whole time. I was suspicious here, but still not sure about what’s going on, so I didn’t cut it off.

I asked for her socials – she gave me her insta and fb, both seemed to be profiles created not too long ago, although she had friends/followers that were real and seemed genuine enough for the most part. Still – very suspicious profiles.

And then as I asked her about why her socials are the way they are, she started to be waaaay too quick about things, hinting at her wanting to visit me since she liked my city so much, even hinting jokingly about her being my future wife. That’s when I thought « hold your horses » and started fading away from the convo.

Third day – she started with a very flirty good morning text, asked about my day. I told her how my day goes, she responded telling me she is off work because she is trading now – and started going into WAAAY too much detail on how her trading goes. Crypto trading, of course. Until then, her messages were rather multiple short texts, here she was writing novels, and you could see the language was different than before – these trading novels were visibly pre-written in perfect English and slightly modified to fit our convo, while until then, her English was OK-ish but not great at all. And then she sent me a picture of her Coinbase balance, showing a rather large balance in US dollars. Way larger than anyone would have who still works a 9-5, as she said previously. She was trying to get me to install the platforms she insisted are the best, and already started saying that I should copy trade and start with this and that amount – and I blocked her then.

So, TL;DR – you can absolutely get scammed on dating apps, and the scammers to put quite some work into the communication and set-up. I consider myself not dumb, I am certainly not desperate to date, yet the conversation was well set-up enough to catch me for a little while.

Be careful, everyone! Hope this story can stay and has some use.