Sextortion, deepfakes and rejection violence were the things that were spoken during the Katy Benoit keynote on the dangers of dating online.
Adam Dodge, the founder of EndTAB, gave the keynote address to provide information on new forms of online abuse.
“I’ve done a lot of work with victims of gender-based violence and online stalking,” Dodge said. “What I’ve learned from those cases is when you start to reverse engineer that and see how these things happen, you can start to think about ways you can prevent it.”
Dodge discussed how behavior changes from online and physical interactions due to anonymity, with no real sense of consequence and a lack of empathy.
“There’s no real-time consequences to your actions if you do something abusive or mean. There’s not going to be that immediate response,” Dodge said. “There’s not going to be other people around who might judge you or shame you or get involved in it.”
An example of this is rejection violence, which often leads to verbal abuse when someone gets rejected.
“It’s instances online where people, often men, react violently towards women who reject their expressions of romantic or sexual interest online by engaging in verbal aggression, verbal abuse,” Dodge said.
Another thing that Dodge highlighted was how much information one could put out online. Sites like fastpeoplechecker.com can be used to find phone numbers and street addresses.
“The point is it’s really easy for people to learn things about us that we’re not ready for them to know,” Dodge said.
Unregistering these data broker sites is surprisingly easy. For fast people checker, simply go to fastpeoplechecker.com/remove. Another way to take back control of your data is by opting out of Google searches.
“Google just announced this a few months ago. You can opt-out of Google searches for your personal identifying information,” Dodge said. “So now somebody goes in and looks up your name, and all those search results come out showing all the information about you on these data broker sites that gets wiped.”
Making social media accounts private, not using middle initials and not saying where you go to college are steps to protecting your data.
Catfishing and deepfakes have become a tool that is becoming used when it comes to sextortion. Dodge said that sextortion is a dating scam that targets men the most, where the victim is threatened with the leaking of nudes for money.
What used to be revenge porn, but with the advancement of technology, scammers are using it to target people and threaten them with it.
“Last year, the FBI reported an increase of up to 18,000 cases in 2021,” Dodge said. “This is low by several orders of magnitude because men are the most targeted by this. Many men are not reporting because there’s a lot of shame that goes into this.”
What happens in these cases is the allure of intimacy. Dodge said that an account on a dating site would message a guy and try to get a nude him as fast as possible.
“What do they want that guy to do? You send nudes back, and as soon as they do, their screen fills up with an extortion threat,” Dodge said. “With threats to send it to the parents, people report that it happens almost immediately because time is money.”
Deepfakes, an AI image of a person that does not exist, are used to make these accounts. These fakes offer the anonymity that protects them from being researched.
“My point is when we’re out dating and we’re online, we’re not thinking is this person an artificial AI-generated image,” Dodge said. “We’re just moving through our lives online.”
There are ways to see if a user is using a fake image. Dodge said asking the person to take a quick photo of them doing something can help to prove they are a real person or a quick video call.
Tinder and Bumble have features that prove a user has undergone an identity verification process, helping users know the account belongs to a real person.
However, there are some issues with this. Dodges said that people still need to be wary of who they meet online. There are instances when the person on the other end of the call may do the things asked but can still be a scammer.
If people still want to send nudes, Dodge said there are safe ways to send them. Not having identifiable markings or tattoos in the photos, no faces or notable things on the walls.
“We know people are going to send nudes. They’re going to be sending nudes,” Dodge said. “We want them to do it safely.”
Daniel V. Ramirez can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @DVR_Tweets