He also ran a series of now-defunct scam dating sites with fake profiles around 2010-2015, and has been quite consistent at only operating scam businesses in the past 15 years. I know nothing about the people who hand over money to this guy, and I hope to keep it that way.
> For example, to entice individuals to invest in their acquisitions, they said their portfolio companies were "on fire" and that "cash flow is strong."
Clearly if someone tells you their stonks are "on fire" that's all the due diligence you need to do as a buyer. Some people just really deeply believe that there exist risk-free get-rich-quick schemes.
I find it difficult not to do at least a little bit of victim blaming here...
What is a "scam dating site"? A site where AI-driven profiles you contact with, phish or socially-engineer your money out of you? That probably couldn't happen in 2015 let alone 2010, AI tech wasn't yet there.
If you mean just a "dating site where all female profiles are fake, generated by site itself", then well, it's just called a "dating site".
Whole dating sites industry - with hundreds if not thousands of companies, downstream industries providing them traffic, payments, and services of all kinds, industry associations, conferences, rich networking and whatnot - is doing just that. Always did. The few "real" dating apps/sites like Tinder are just a tip of the iceberg - no one tries to really imitate them - it's not possible.
Almost everything viable on the Internet today, is a "scam" in this (to my taste, extremely strict and old-fashioned, definition). Just because all available real attention has already been harvested a long time ago, and cost of traffic, which is extremely high now because extensive way of attracting it - by having people spend more time at the screen - is no longer available as people already spend glued to the screens all day - so every time to have them visit your site you have to pay more than the other guy pays to have them visit theirs - it's an auction and prices are through the roof.
Thus, if you sell people something which isn't fake, you aren't going to turn a profit. So all who did, are out of business - with the exception of yes, "big tech" monopolies that can exploit the shit out of people in a way no run of the mill scammer like those two poor hapless chaps can even dream of.
> A site where AI-driven profiles you contact with, phish or socially-engineer your money out of you? That probably couldn't happen in 2015 let alone 2010, AI tech wasn't yet there.
Why do you think you need AI for this? You don't even need Indians for this, Americans will do it. I remember someone showing me a site a couple years ago that recruited for the job, and there was a Reddit where they talked about working it and how the rates paid were changing.
In a manual mode these days it certainly can't work. People are no longer that gullible. But to think, in 2010 it likely could! So that could be a thing.
It still works in manual mode and it is still mostly done manually, despite AI. This is the "chat" model powering 6 billion dollars of annual OnlyFans revenue and billions of dollars to dating sites advertising "girls in your area" on porn sites. Armies of mostly Filipino chatters pretend to be women and do what is essentially a soft romance scam.
Governments have essentially never looked into it, despite it having gone on uninhibited for 20+ years and at the scale of billions annually for at least 16+ years.
Fun fact: outside of the Anglosphere it's mostly people who pretend to be men, siphoning money off lonely women. Typical fake profile is a handsome American colonel deployed to Iraq (i met several women who flirted with "him" lmao), that was like, 10 years ago.
As someone who has been involved in dating sites you have no idea how standard this is.
Until Match bought the industry it was pretty much impossible to launch a dating site with profiles. The industry standard was to post fakes. Real users would then receive stock responses to keep them around until real people showed up. No AI needed. Just a bag of standard emails. Guys are incredibly dumb and ego driven. It’s very easy to get them to think a beautiful stranger is into them.
Uhh that's just every dating site since at least the 2000s.
They didn't need LLMs to build bots.
Ashley Madison for example was 10 bots for every one real woman or something absurd.
If you need something more sophisticated than basic template based bots (which always worked just fine, your marks are uh, not exactly the most observant people and really really really want to believe the pretty girl likes them), then it is probably still cheaper to run a literal slave operation in some South Asian state than pay per token.
Creating fake profiles for a dating site is basically what the Reddit founders did to create Reddit. It’s no more ethically compromised than what many YC companies do.
The ones that get labeled as scams are just the ones that executed poorly
Many if not most scam companies scam the consumer, which is indistinguishable from profiting off a consumer.
There are also many “legitimate” tech companies that don’t make any profit, but balloon their valuation all the way to an IPO or SPAC and then profit off public investors.
So your definition still can’t distinguish between “real” companies and scam companies
