Category Archives: Safety-Theatre

When Safety Forgot about Scammers

For a while, I’ve been thinking about how the online dating moderation space shifted from focusing primarily on tackling masses of spam, much of which was scam-related, to prioritizing individual safety. In theory, that should’ve been a good thing – but in reality, something important got lost along the way. I feel somewhat responsible for that because I led this major shift, but I did try to rebalance this a few years later. Even so, scams are still not taken nearly as seriously as user safety on dating sites any more.

Back in the early days of modern dating sites, scam prevention wasn’t much of a blip on the radar. In 2013, when I was head of moderation at OkCupid, we mostly cared about the spam that always precedes scams because dating site users hated seeing obvious spam. A site full of spammers is going to lose users, many of whom are convinced (wrongly in most cases) that they are created by the site to increase the number of users people see. An abundance of spammy profiles impacted our user base, and although we didn’t charge money at the time, so there was no bottom line to worry about yet, we still wanted to keep people happy and on the site, and for them to rave about us to their friends.

The workflow and tools ultimately led us to prioritize spam as a whole, rather than concentrating just on scams. Little thought was ever given to the consequences of the spam-to-scam path anywhere on the Internet. The team responsible for handling potential scammers was called the “spammer admins”, and the tool used by almost all front-line moderators in the company was a spam reduction tool called Spamadmin. That tells you everything about priorities at the time.

As time went on, the moderation teams became full-time, less informal, and better trained and managed. My focus completely shifted from spam and general abuse toward individual safety (harassment, stalking, and assault prevention). We still had a team dealing with spammers, but they were mostly made up of newer workers, with most of the experienced ones moving up through the safety and incident-response teams.

When Elie Seidman joined as the CEO of OkCupid in 2016, I was changing the way I thought of safety to really concentrate on dealing with individuals who may cause actual harm to our users or dealing with ones who already had. We worked on creating teams with people who could talk to victims of crimes and often help them with the cold system they would face if they reported anything. The focus of our safety teams changed dramatically, yet scam victims still received no support. Elie sat through lots of late-night chats with me about my visions for safety and he saw first-hand how successful my team was at what it did when our investigations team caught the person sending him anthrax and other nasty things through the post and passed the information to the FBI leading to his arrest and conviction. This was all happening at the time OkCupid was in a major lawsuit brought by a rape victim in Georgia who said that we didn’t do enough to protect her against a known abuser coming back to the site in 2014 which at least changed a lot in how we dealt with serious incident reports.

When Elie left to go to Tinder in 2018, he promoted me to Head of Safety at OkCupid and took my Trust and Safety ethos, with its distilled focus of prioritising in-person abusers with him. At the same time, the rest of the dating industry was also moving further toward prioritizing in-person safety – with Bumble making big PR wins by announcing innovative safety features that OkCupid had been doing quietly for years. By the time Match Group created a new centralised Safety Team – staffed with external trophy hires who had no experience with dating sites – any focus on scams had almost entirely disappeared.

A couple of years after Elie moved to Tinder in 2018, Match Group hired a new central Safety Team of ‘trophy hires’ that was exclusively focused on this shift in safety and had zero interest in scams. I had been one of the key people changing the conversation from scams toward individual safety, and I was starting to rethink and regret that. I tried to bring scams back into the discussion, but it was too late to do too much by then.

Meanwhile, scams weren’t slowing down. Match Group has a group-wide mentor program, and in early 2021 my mentee at Tinder was scammed out of $60,000-80,000 in a very clever crypto scam. There was no internal training or discussion about scams like this in a company that theoretically has some of the best moderation and user safety in the world. In the same month, on the opposite side of the USA, an OkCupid executive’s mother-in-law lost $300,000 in what looked to be the same scam. We compared messages they both received, and they were nearly identical. These weren’t just “small-time” cons – this was organised crime operating at a massive scale.

Around the same time, a surge in sextortion scams targeted Muslim men, preying on cultural vulnerabilities. Scammers posing as women or gay men would lure them into explicit conversations that they video captured and then threaten to expose them to their families, communities, and workplaces. The emotional blackmail was brutal, and the consequences, in many cases, were life-ending.

Back in 2018, my focus was almost entirely on in-person safety – but that year, something shifted. Scams came back into focus for me after reading Will Ferguson’s 2012 novel “419”, about notorious Nigerian internet scams and the crime rings behind them. The book focuses on the family of a victim who took her own life after falling for a romance scam, and her daughter who tries to find out the truth. The book was very well researched and became required reading for my teams. I started to refocus on the fact that scams are user safety, with potential victims facing financial ruin, blackmail, and unfortunately, often suicides. These aren’t just “spam” issues, they’re absolutely safety issues. But the industry spent years treating them as separate problems, forcing a staffing effort choice between protecting people from bodily harm or protecting them from financial devastation. This divide was a mistake.

It’s cold, but the truth is that while sexual assault is devastating, a scam can also destroy an entire extended family in many different ways – and often does. If someone takes their own life because of a scam, the ripple effects are enormous. The fact that the industry ever framed this as an “either/or” issue instead of recognising the catastrophic damage both can cause was a fundamental (but understandable) failure. That mindset must change.

When Match Group safety started taking more notice of Pairs, a successful Japanese dating site it had bought a few years before, I started talking to Tomomi Tanaka there about scams because she’d heard me trying to get some effort put into them. Scams were somewhat alien to Japanese culture, so users of Pairs were fairly easy targets. By 2021, I had spent three years trying to bring Romance Scams, Sextortion, and Crypto Scams into the central safety conversation – all without success, even after an executive’s family had been scammed. The new central team was not interested and was resistant to anything they didn’t know or understand. In 2021, Tomomi created a report titled Cryptocurrency Scammers in Japan. I had hoped it would gain traction, but in my time there, it didn’t. By that point, I was ready to leave anyway.

[ This is a copy of a post I made on https://artofsecurity.com ]

Down the rabbit hole of Trudeau’s gun ban in Canada

I’ve been meaning to write something about Trudeau’s gun ban in Canada for about 2 years now, mostly as a follow-up to my 2013 post about the British bans. I kept putting it off. Partly because the subject is annoying, and partly because I knew I’d end up rewriting it a hundred times anyway.

I decided to get GPT to fact-check some things for me, and since it’s getting pretty good at putting things together in my style now, I got it to write me an outline for this based on my notes and questions, which I then butchered. My GPT instance named itself Arlo – So thanks, Arlo. My first GPT-sorted weblog post, which now I don’t have to write a separate post about!

As an aside, I think I once promised to write something at least once a decade in this weblog. I failed, sorry.

A small note, the same as in the 2013 post – I am probably going to refer to guns, I know that guns are usually artillery, but I am using the general term to cover long guns and handguns. See that post for the distinctions, I just don’t want to complicate things.

Back in 2020, Trudeau suddenly banned over 1,500 models of what the anti-gun folks like to call “assault-style” firearms. No parliamentary debate, no vote, just an executive action that came out of nowhere. They called it a public safety measure, but it has always felt more like a PR move, something to make headlines and gain some short-term victory with people who don’t know the first thing about guns.

The ban was full of contradictions. It targeted rifles that looked scary but were, functionally, no different from many hunting rifles. Meanwhile, it left out the SKS, a semi-automatic battlefield rifle from the 1940s that still has its folding bayonet attached. Designed for the Red Army after WW2, the SKS was a short-lived predecessor to the much more famous AK-47. When the AK-47 proved more effective (as it still is today), millions of unused SKS rifles were packed into crates, coated in cosmoline (a brown waxy petroleum jelly), and stored away. Sixty years later, someone decided to start selling them in bulk to Canada, an ideal market being one of the only Western countries that still allowed firearms imports from Russia and China (unlike the USA).

The SKS fires cheap and readily available 7.62x39mm ammunition, and quickly became popular in Canada. Sellers could buy grease-filled wooden crates of them for a few hundred dollars, some of them brand new, some obviously used. Individual rifles went for as little as $80 if you were willing to clean off the gunk yourself or $30 or so extra for them to be shiny and clean. Prices have gone up considerably since then, with decent examples now selling for well over $500. Any compensation for banning them would need to reflect that big increase in price since the 2020 ban.

A Russian SKS rifle, duplicated one on top of the other to show both sides. The stock is polished wood and there is a folded in metal bayonet on the dangerous end. The SKS is still excluded from Trudeau's gun ban in Canada.

From Wikipedia – A 1945 SKS rifle. Trudeau’s gun ban in Canada didn’t ban these as being ‘assault weapons’.

Somehow, the SKS, the military rifle of the Soviet Union after WW2, with its folding bayonet, is fine, and not an assault weapon. The official line was that the SKS is used by Indigenous hunters, so it was left alone out of respect for that. This sounds thoughtful, until you realise it’s also the rifle that would cost the most to buy back. Suddenly the official line sounds like a completely bollocks excuse. There are probably well over a million SKS rifles in the country, all of them unregistered. Nobody knows who has them or how many there are. If they’d banned the SKS, it would have caused an absolute logistical and financial nightmare, so they didn’t. This is where the logic of the whole ban starts to crumble. It stops being about consistent principles and becomes about politics, cost, and convenience. This was a key decision that exposed the contradictions at the heart of a mess that Canada is still reckoning with.

Trudeau’s gun ban didn’t just hit long guns, it blindsided handgun owners and collectors too. In 2022 a new action decreed that there would be no new handgun sales, no transfers, nothing. The regulation and rules for handguns have always been very strict in Canada so this was really targeting the most regulated, licenced, and well trained people. This ban really stung because a lot of us have spent years building legal collections. Mostly for the sport or for historical collecting – But also as what used to be a guaranteed investment. I have handguns I was planning to sell off as part of my retirement, but I can’t anymore. Now they just sit there, locked up and essentially worthless. The Liberal government talks about compensation but it’ll never reflect the actual value, especially for antiques and rarities. It’ll be a pretty paltry sum if anything ever comes of it at all.

There’s another issue with handguns that may well hit me and other people who bought some of their handguns as parts guns. These are handguns that were probably not originally functional anyway and have basically been gutted to repair another gun. Often there’s nothing left of the original. I think I have two that fit into this situation, so how am I going to give those back? I never expected them to ask me to account for them – But now it seems I may have to. Will a signed affidavit that there is nothing of the original gun left, or will I have to create something to give them?

The enforcement side of things is also going to be a farce. Most of the newly banned rifles were never registered, so no one knows who’s got what. They’re not going to be handed in, they’ll get stashed, stored, or buried until a Conservative government gets in and reverses the bans. Same with handguns, although these are registered so they’re at least on the books for now. Since the ban, people have died and suddenly those handguns have gone missing. Not many folks are ringing up the RCMP to hand them over, so they are slipping out into the grey market. I know of people who’ve had those quiet conversations: Grampy didn’t tell us what happened to them… The cops can’t arrest a corpse, can they?

The thing is that none of this is a surprise. When you treat people like criminals, they start behaving like criminals. Generally not out of malice, but out of a sense of self-preservation. We had a well-regulated system that most gun owners followed to the letter. We locked our cabinets, took our courses, filed our paperwork, and played by the rules. Now those rules are gone, and nobody trusts the system anymore. People do what they feel they have to, especially when a struggling government starts seizing their property on the back of a flimsy and inconsistent political excuse.

What’s worse is that it won’t even help. Most major gun crime in Canada doesn’t come from legal gun owners. The two notable exceptions are the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre and the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting, both involving legally owned firearms. But the shootings that triggered these bans were carried out almost entirely with illegal guns – smuggled or stolen. Instead of tackling the sources of those illegal firearms, Trudeau’s government went after the easy target with big PR value: licenced owners. The vast majority of licenced Canadian gun owners are incredibly law-abiding (if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have stuck to all the obscure rules for this long), and it’s much easier to demonise people than to address the real causes. The unlicenced ones are already criminals, so no new laws were needed there, just better enforcement of existing ones.

It was all just obvious desperation and security theatre. A Prime Minister with sinking poll numbers trying to score points with people who wouldn’t know a restricted PAL from a banana clip [That was a good one Arlo, I left that in!]. The result was that a few million Canadians were suddenly labelled as potential threats, just for owning the same thing they did the day before and leaving taxpayers, and whichever government comes next with a multi-billion dollar bill.

None of it makes sense if you assume the government were trying to improve safety. It only makes sense if you realise they were trying to win a news cycle. A month ago, I’d have said the Conservatives were a surefire bet to win, and this is a single-issue election topic for a lot of people as was seen in rural elections in 2024. Even if you’re not a gun owner, you ought to be pissed off about how this was pushed through by executive action, without any real reason, consistency, or evidence. Trump’s threatened war with Canada (trade and territorial) has changed the polls in the next election, and given Pee Pee’s love of Trump I’d hope these people would vote Liberal now. I don’t think many will – I’m not even sure I would, but thankfully I can’t vote anyway, so I don’t have to agonise about it.

If the Liberals lose because they pissed off 3 million gun owners for short-term propaganda gains, it’d serve them right.


Notes:

. Pee Pee is Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s Conservative leader. Endorsed by Trump and backed by American billionaires. May the gods save Canada if that whiney orange teat-sucker gets in.

. There’s an SKS unboxing video showing some of the cosmoline here on YouTube.