How To Avoid Online Dating Scams?

I decided to talk about today’s topic after an expat contacted me recently about falling into a Tinder date scam. I shall share with you his experience, which I shall call the bar scam in full and ways to avoid similar scams, and what to do if you have been scammed.

I’m just going to call this guy Fred for confidentiality purposes. Fred came to China not long ago and met a nice Chinese girl through Tinder, and she invited him out on a date one Saturday afternoon. The girl told him that she wanted to get all liquored up with him, so Fred thought, hey why not, maybe if I get her drunk enough she’ll be willing to come over for Netflix and chill. So the girl started ordering some champagnes, and over the course of 3 hours, they had already downed 3 bottles and Fred was presented with the bill when she tried to order another bottle of whisky.

Fred thought that there was a typing mistake when he saw that those champagnes had cost him 12,000 RMB, and was notified by the waiter that it was not 1,200. For your information, 12,000 Yuan equals 1,700 US dollars, and that’s like 600 dollars per bottle. So unless you’re popping some Doms, there is absolutely no way that those champagnes are that expensive. Fred ended up paying 2,000 RMB, which is around 300 dollars, as that was all that he had. That is still not cheap for a normal bottle of sparkling wine, as you can get these at the supermarket at 10 dollars per bottle.

This is a common scam that you may encounter on dating apps, so the moral of the story is that you should be careful of girls that sound too eager to go out with you on a date when you’ve just met each other a day ago. You should always pick the location to avoid being scammed, and if the girl refuses to go there, it’s time to get your scam alert up. If you’re already stuck in that situation, you should call the police on the spot and refuse to pay. Fred was lucky to just lose only 300 dollars on this.