How to spot a fake hookup site

A lot of what gets sold as a "hookup site" is a subscription business with fake women as the product demo. You can usually tell within five minutes, if you know where to look.

What regulators have found

• Ashley Madison: the FTC charged that the site created fake "engager" profiles of women to lure men into paying, 28,417 of them in 2014 alone. Its operators settled in 2016.
• Match.com: in its 2019 complaint the FTC alleged Match sent "someone is interested in you" ads prompted by accounts it had already flagged as likely fraudulent, to sell subscriptions. Match Group settled other charges in that case for $14M in 2025.

If big, established companies have been accused of this, assume the anonymous ones in your spam folder do worse.

The five-minute test

1. Sign up with no photo and an empty bio. If women start messaging you anyway, they aren't women.
2. Check what's free. If you can receive messages but must pay to read or answer them, the business is the paywall.
3. Read the terms. Search for "fictitious", "operator", "entertainment purposes" or "virtual". Sites that pay staff or bots to chat often disclose it there. If you find it, close the tab.
4. Look for verification. Feeld, Pure and the mainstream apps offer photo verification. No verification at all is not proof of fakes, but it means the site isn't trying.
5. Count the impossible. The same "2 miles away" women in every city, counters of "members online now" that never move, or a profile that is too perfect and too eager.

When a real person is the scam

Not every fake is a bot. Romance scammers cost Americans $1.14 billion in 2023, per the FTC, and on hookup apps the usual play is sextortion: get explicit photos fast, then threaten to send them to your contacts. Don't pay, stop replying, keep the evidence and report it (see the FTC links below).