Plenty of Fish pof.com plentyoffish.com Most profiles are FAKE, designed to obtain your phone number

I've been on Plentyoffish.com for less than a month, having communicated primarily with men who listed engineer or doctor as their profession.  I was stunned and delighted at how many profiles listed these professions. 

Most of the text messages they sent me contained grammar, syntax, and punctuation errors.  At first, I dismissed them as auto-correct errors which were not being caught because the man was not proofreading his messages… although I was surprised that engineers and doctors were not proofreading their work!

It was also obvious that most of these men spoke English as a second language so I asked where they were from originally.  All identified a country in Europe. 

And all were pushing me to get off the POF app, wanting to communicate by phone, WhatsApp, or Google Hangouts.

After talking with about a dozen men, I saw a clear pattern, became suspicious, and did a Google Image search on the men I was communicating with heavily.  One image turned out to be a Colombian surgeon whose photos have been frequently used in fake dating profiles!

Then I did a thorough analysis of the language in the profiles.  They all included the same kind of linguistic errors.  And one of the most distinctive errors was the inability to use singulars and plurals correctly -- a tell-tale sign of native Chinese speakers.

Having worked extensively with engineers and doctors, I know a lot of terms and concepts in both fields, so I developed a sure-fire question to identify fake profiles.  “Tell me something about your profession that most lay people would not know. “  

Only 1 man tried to answer and it sounded like something from Wikipedia.  So I went to the Wikipedia entry for that profession and sure enough, he had paraphrased the first sentence in Wikipedia!  None of the other men responded.  Not only did they ghost me, they blocked their profiles from receiving messages and in one case, he changed his photos to those of a different man!

After that, I scrutinized the profile of every man who messaged me.  Lots of “engineers” and “doctors” whose highest level of education was “some high school” or “some college”! 

After submitting over a dozen ‘fake profile’ reports to POF, I asked Customer Support for a refund because about 90% of the profiles I read were clearly fake.  Of course, POF refused.  "Fees are nonrefundable."

The thing is… I know people who met someone great through POF. 

But right now, it is clearly being targeted by criminals.  And it looks as though POF is doing little to stop it.