Hundreds of Freelancers Hired to Perform Online 'Catfishing on an Industrial Scale'

Wired reports on "hundreds of freelancers employed all over the world to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites." They describe one worker at Cyprus-based vDesk as "expected to lure people into paying, message by message, for conversations with fictional characters." WIRED spoke to dozens of people working in the industry, people who had worked for months at a time at two of the companies involved in the creation of virtual profiles... Often recruited into "customer support" or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online... Freelancers working in the industry say they make a fraction of the money users are paying. Workers earn around 7 cents per message, or 2 euro an hour. WIRED shares stories from a "freelance customer support representative" in Ireland and a "freelance remote translator" in Mexico who both ended up doing the same kind of work. (And ironically, both reported they ended up talking to people they knew in real-life...) For the worker in Mexico, "his chat history had all of his personal details: his name, city, job, past marriages. His kids' names and ages. For nearly two years, he had been talking to a virtual. He says he's in love with her." The portals "usually include lengthy terms and conditions," the article points out, with most saying something like "we may use system profiles at our discretion to communicate with users to enhance our users' entertainment experience..." Once she got over the realization — on her first day working for the company — that translating really meant "flirting through fake profiles," she couldn't help but be impressed by how detailed the virtuals are. "The fakes don't seem like obviously unattainable women, they are eerily convincing and hyper-specific," she says... The sites collect detailed information about users, building profiles that help the freelancers maintain the fiction. These contain their living arrangements, details about their family and marital status ("single after two failed marriages," one read), and other personal details. "It will add their kids' names and ages, when they tell us them," Alice says, "if they have been to therapy recently, what they have been feeling — anything which can be used by the virtual to keep a sense of real connection..." If the user asks to move off to a free messaging app, the freelancers must write through the virtuals "I prefer to stay in here until I know you better" or "I feel safer on this app until we are better acquainted," and so on... One morning, Alice opened her chat to a new message: "Please stop talking to my husband, he is spending money we do not have to talk to you," read the chat line. The workers don't even know the source of their profile pictures, Wired points out. "A reverse-image search on some of the images seen by WIRED show that at least some are grabbed from pornography sites."

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