Being the utter nerd I am in my attempts at seeing if I can even chat to a girl I've also turned it into something of a research project on the obvious and I'm putting my programmer hat on when dealing with this problem. I thought though if other people are having problems sniffing these fuckers out who are looking to take advantage of desperate people it would be helpful to post up a bit of advice about them. I am of course talking about dating sites but with the amount of social media fakery it should help generally too. Bots are thankfully quite easy to figure out, you can literally write gibberish and they'll try to act like they're human with 'Hi how are you?" and so on which at least makes it easier to eliminate them from pile I've seen other people simply write potato and I think that's a pretty good way to deal with them. They usually seem to be scammers who are trying to link you to shitty porn sites The other scammers are a bit more difficult to figure out and can be harder to handle because they get very aggressive and try to use gaslighting tactics to shame you about questioning them. There's a simple way around this though, they'll get very aggressive about getting you to sign up to a specific social media site or app. In my case it was often the WhatsApp scammers. If you keep trying to get them to sign up to a site like discord which doesn't require a phone number or anything then they usually give up. I think at the very least they're trolling for a phone number so they can send scam texts or perhaps sell any information they can get off you. As a result I've pretty much put on my profile to use discord so any actual humans will see that and use their brains. Finally, this one is a bit more technical but another way you can eliminate the scammers and bots from the pool really quickly is if you go to your matches on a dating site and right click on the 'matches' and then click 'view page source'. I found out about this great little work around online and it does work for the most part but not on sites like Tinder and OkCupid which have finally fixed the exploit. I think you can still get some sort of blurred photograph depending on the site. I also think that their whole spiel about 'dating privacy' and so on is just another way of them coming up with an excuse to make it so people can't use free accounts to view other accounts and yet again inflate their numbers to attract suckers to pay their way past the paywall. What you can do is find direct links to the photographs of users that have 'liked' you and it's unfortunately the case that all those 'likes' you're getting on sites are fake as fuck which is depressing. I know people are going to scream at me and go "duh, of course it's a scam" but the point is I'm confirming it with actual proof. The dating sites are clearly letting these bots and scammers operate in order to inflate their numbers. It will also show more innocent minded users exactly what's gong on so they can know how to avoid it all. It's a piss take and yes I know it's obvious to those of us in the know, but easily 95% of these profiles at least are scams. I did find it very interesting investigating it all properly though. I mean god damn forget about all the dating scam stuff a lot of the 'advice' I see online is terrible I stumbled on a youtube video where a guy was talking about how guys don't pay their way for women when they might end up getting laid if they did. Which is literally him advocating for being a simp even though that's another great way to get yourself scammed as a guy even if you're meeting up with a real woman. TLDR: Bots will respond to utter gibberish if you put it in the chat and scammers are deathly afraid of going onto chat software like discord and there are a huge number of fake bot accounts out there which are being hidden by the site owners to boost their fake numbers. I honestly think at some point these companies who let this go on are going to face lawsuits from advertisers and investors with how blatant it is if they finally start seeing their numbers dropping and they do even a basic investigation. Now I'm tempted to poke around the finances of dating sites in detail lol.