She’s just not that into you… because she’s a bot

Dating app maker arrested for scamming people with bots

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The CCTV segment -- titled “Traps on the internet”, also blasted online gambling. (Picture: CCTV)

Published: 8:30pm, 26 Oct 2018Updated: 8:43am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Of all the ways online dating doesn’t work out, this may just be the worst: Talking to someone for a week, spending loads of money... and then realizing she’s a bot.

Wang Xiaopeng (not his real name), a 23-year-old man in Guangdong, downloaded a dating app named Lover Net. He says it was ranking the highest on an unspecified app store and he was greeted by flirtatious voice messages from multiple female users, according to a CCTV news segment.

Then, right after one of them told Wang she could be his girlfriend, the app said that he had to pay to continue talking to her. He paid -- feeling eager to find a girlfriend because of peer pressure, the CCTV report says. But the girl started brushing him off and soon stopped replying.

After asking customer support for help to find the girl, he paid 1999 yuan (US$288) for another service called “matchmaker one on one”, which could supposedly help him get in touch. Guess what? It didn’t, and customer support never got back to him again.

Another man interviewed by CCTV also said a girl he liked only seemed to be interested after receiving a virtual gift from him -- the gift costs real money -- and never agreed to meet with him.

“Then I started to feel like she’s full of lies,” the man said in the CCTV interview.