An interview with a Japanese dating site scammer

We’ve written before about the problem of scams in the Japanese “dating site” industry, where customers think they are interacting with real women who want to meet them but are actually exchanging messages with someone (perhaps even a man) who is trying to ensure they keep paying the membership fees for as long as possible.

In a recent article on Japan Today, someone apparently interviewed two such scammers.

The first is actually just someone who worked as a cheap hostess bar. We don’t think this qualifies, since though it is possible for a customer to take a hostess out on a date, it’s not really a scam in the sense that the man already knows he is paying for her drinks and time.

We were more interested in the second interview and example: a sakura (fake person, plant) at a dating website (deai-kei site).

She had to pretend to be a woman genuinely looking for a boyfriend but she was part of a team of 30 such women whose job was to write messages and keep men interested (and so keep on paying the fees for the service). She notes that most of the women — at least they were women, unlike some such sites — were shy types and socially awkward, while the site was run by these flashy guys who graduated from top universities.

The interview suggests that such scammer jobs are appealing for people with low social skills who don’t want to talk to people face to face.

“Then, when I was looking at a job-hunting site, I found a listing for an ’email writing’ position. They hired me, and when I showed up for work, the job was being a dating site sakura.”

But such fake dating sites rarely last long. Such was the case this time.

“One day, I showed up at the office for work, and the company had vanished. The computers, the furniture, everything was gone — the room was empty. We tried calling the managers’ phones, but the numbers weren’t in service anymore. I was stunned.”

The management are sometimes the one who end up on the evening news doing the perp walk.

In more recent years, with the rise of simpler and safer dating apps like Tinder in Japan, and when people can check if a website or service is legit just by a quick Google search, it might seem strange that there is any sort of market still for such deai-kei sites.

But men join (or used to join) the old style of deai-kei sites perhaps because they treat it like compensated dating and a quick fix (i.e., looking for a sex friend, not a partner), one step removed from prostitution. They probably expect to pay the woman (either in cash or with a meal), who in turn is expecting to have sex with the man. That is, of course, if the whole site isn’t fake and full of scammers.