Lonely Hearts Beware Tinder Bot Romance.

• Position: DATING APPS

Scammers on dating apps not only may break your heart, but your bank account. According to the FBI's Internet Crime Report, romance and confidence fraud is the second costliest scam, to which people lost almost $500,000,000 last year.

"Despite being one of the smoothest and easiest-to-use dating apps, Tinder is full of fake accounts and bots that can ruin the whole user experience," warns Ruby Gonzalez, head of Communications at Nord-VPN. "Tinder bots are scripts written to imitate human conversations intended to spam or scam users. Although bots are becoming more sophisticated these days, they usually follow certain patterns which, once identified, can help you avoid them."

A typical scenario: a bot chats with you for a bit, then tells you that either for his or her safety, or your own, your Tinder account needs to be verified. That is called an account verification scam. The rule of thumb is that ordinary Tinder users cannot verify their accounts. If you are given a link that looks like it has something to do with Tinder, remember that it will take you to a phishing site where scammers can get your personal details and even trick you into revealing your credit card information.

If your conversation turns into a request to click on a link to see some photos or continue chatting outside of Tinder, you probably are facing a dick-on-a-link scam. Those links might infect your smartphone with matware, steal your personal data, shower you with annoying ads, make you sign up for an expensive subscription, etc.

However, there are ways to tell...