You must have played “Date, Marry, Kill” at least once during school days. It was a fun pastime that allowed us to know whether our secret crush would choose to date, marry, or kill us.
But what if it wasn’t a game at all? What if your crush was deciding not between dating or marrying you—but robbing or killing you?
If you’re a woman using popular Dating Apps, the question isn’t hypothetical but real.
Smooth-talker, or a robber?
When Shruti (name changed) received a text from her match on a popular dating app asking if she wanted to meet, she was excited. After all, they’d been talking for the past few days.
Finally, their conversation which was till then online was transcending into the physical realm.
Her match showed up with a friend at around noon at her house in Delhi. As they talked, his friend waited in the other room.
Enjoying time with him, she decided to meet him again the same night.
When he arrived again at 10:30 pm, Shruti thought this might be the beginning of something special.
Little did she know, it would end in violence and terror.
She was hit in the face, had her limbs tied up, and her mouth taped.
With her mobility restricted, she was robbed of her gold chain, mobile phone, and cash.
But what happened with Shruti wasn’t a one-off incident. When the police finally caught the culprits based on the FIR registered by Shruti, it was revealed that many like her were targeted by the duo but never came forward due to shame.
But the duo could only achieve this because the Dating App they used didn’t do its job properly. They revealed that it usually took 4 days for the app to verify new members- during which, they could not only commit the crime, but also make a new account from the phones they stole from their victims.
Out of your league, or a nightmare?
There’s a dopamine rush when you match with someone out of your league, right?
You ensure each of your texts is perfect and does not sabotage the connection. You (over)think about how they’d perceive you.
But with this proclivity to please, sometimes people acquiesce to the demands and wishes of the person they want to impress, even if that entails going out of their comfort zone.
A half an hour away from where Shruti lived, another incident unfolded; albeit at a different time but affecting not tens but around 700 women.
Earlier this month, a man was apprehended from Delhi for deceiving women using an international model’s images and blackmailing them for not leaking their intimate images and videos he cunningly acquired after winning their trust.
The police found him possessing 13 credit cards issued by various banks.
His modus operandi?
Using a model’s images to enchant women and build a rapport through fictional narratives so he could fulfill his ulterior motive- extortion.
What’s surprising is that he did not exploit a loophole in one specific app, but ran his extortion operations across platforms, indicating lax frameworks for verification.
In a similar crime, a woman from Mumbai was duped of approximately INR 3.37 lakh when she received calls from fake customs officials saying that the man she met on a Dating App had been detained at the airport for possessing foreign currency, as he was visiting her from abroad.
A similar case was busted from Noida, where 6 foreign nationals used the same tactics to dupe hundreds of women.
But what makes it worse is that the crimes are not limited to just robbery or extortion.
The love of your life, or a murderer?
The entire nation was shocked when the body parts of Shraddha Walkar were found stuffed inside the refrigerator of her live-in partner whom she met on a popular Dating App.
She fell in love and saw a future with him.
Believing that she had finally found the one she’d yearned for all her life, Shraddha cut herself off from her friends and family which eventually cost her life.
When they left the city to start a new life, quarrels ensued.
Sometimes it was about financial issues, sometimes over suspicion of cheating.
In his confession later, her partner confessed that he’d been planning to kill her for over a week and in fact, invited other women over to his apartment through the same Dating App- all the while Shaddha’s physical remains were in the refrigerator.
But the criminals on Dating Apps aren’t just preying on women.
In a shocking case from Jaipur, a man was invited by his match from a Dating App to her rented accommodation where her accomplices held him hostage and demanded ransom from his family. When the family could not fulfill the demands of the kidnappers, he was brutally stabbed multiple times until he succumbed to death.
Dating Apps as a haven for criminals
Even if the place of crime, the modus operandi, and the gender vary in all these cases, one thing binds them all: Dating Apps.
Since popular Dating Apps are used more for finding casual flings than stable long-term relationships, they have a stigma attached to them. People who are on these apps fear to reveal that they are using them.
The criminals often prey on this fear, helping them easily blackmail the victims or keep their meetings private.
What makes the situation worse (for you, not the criminals) is that these Apps have minimal or no friction during the onboarding with verification systems that can be easily tricked.
While it helps these apps show more active users for their investors, it allows the proliferation of qualitatively poor profiles (and criminals).
Dating apps hold the promise of love and connection, but without safety measures, they also open the door to danger.
All this could be avoided with a simple KYC verification, making the onboarding process more intensive, and verifying information entered by users, as we’ve done. Yet, the apps in question have stuck to business as usual, leaving the user at risk of another impending crime.
No wonder then, the line between the benign game “Date, Marry, Kill” and reality is getting blurred with each passing day.
So maybe the next time you make an account on those apps, it is worth asking whether the person you’re talking to is the love of your life or a cold-blooded murderer.
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