Disclaimer: By featuring the Viola.Ai crypto-project, we are by no means promoting or endorsing them. This post is simply to share information about how blockchain technology can solve social problems like love scams. Please use your own discernment before investing in any coins. IKIGUIDE will not take liability for any losses incurred as a result of investing in featured tokens.

Today I want to write a post about how blockchain technology can be used to minimise love scams. A case study here would be viola.ai. For starters, here’s a video they recently did for singles:

In Numbers: What Is The Social Cost of Love Scams?

According to this article,

“In the U.S., romance scams account for the highest financial losses of all internet-facilitated crimes, the FBI reports. The bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said it received 15,000 romance scam complaints IN 2016 ― a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Reported losses exceeded USD$230 million, but the FBI puts the true number much higher, estimating that only about 15 percent of these crimes are even being reported.”

This implies that the 2016 size of the love scam industry in America is at least USD$230 million! Whoever thought that whispering sweet-nothings into another person’s ears can be worth this much.

Locally, online love scam victims lost a record high of SGD37 million in 2017 alone, in Singapore. SGD 37million is not a small figure, so this social problem is definitely worth looking into.

Firstly, let’s define the term “love scam”.

A “scam” can be defined as misrepresentation of a person or a product. According to this definition, a love scam occurs when a party wilfully and deliberately lies about himself/herself for a certain agenda, usually money, attention or sexual curiosity. The nature of the lie could involve lying that he/she is single when he/she is married, or it could simply be making up stuff about his/her identity.

The next natural question would be–exactly who are subjected to love scams, do they not use their brains?

Well, I used to think like that as well until I found out that two of my friends fell for such scams too. And these two friends– both ladies– are articulate, well-educated and with many years of working experience (i.e. they have met many people in their lives). One is married but felt lonely; the other is single and did not know that the guy who wooed her is married until his wife confronted her.

This led me to conclude that if anybody has some sort of an emotional void in you which someone else can fill by “love bombing”, then this person is a potential victim of love scams.

Therefore, being a victim of love scams is far from not using your brain. It is all about having one or two unmet emotional needs.

The Viola.AI Solution For Singles

Viola.AI actually protects registered singles from love scammers, by:

• Making sure that the registered person is a real person; and
• Using the person’s social network to prompt the person to declare his actual relationship status, since the viola.ai account is linked to the person’s various social media networks.
• Making sure that the guy/lady is not a player, since his/her account is directly linked to the social media account. This is to say that he/she will be unlikely to behave in a way in real life that is inconsistent to his/her actual social reputation.

Well this sounds pretty good so if I were single I would want to be registered onto viola.ai as well, as an insurance! And to do that the user may use viola tokens.

My only concern with this app is that the love scammer might still be able to scam, if he plans well enough. You see, this guy registered on the viola.ai platform can declare himself as single, and then scam by dating many girls on the platform, and then ask each girl for money after a while, right?

So technically he can still scam ladies for money by targeting their most vulnerable emotional voids. And get away with it! Like this epic saga of Chloe Teo and Ashry Owyong Min.

So I was thinking, maybe the Viola.ai team could consider letting users leave reviews of the person they date? Maybe have some anonymous ratings or something after a date, that the ai bot can look into. Or a feedback mechanism that users can use to complain if they discover that their date is cheating on them, or two/three/four/five-timing them.

And…The Viola.AI Love Assistant Bot Is OPEN SOURCE!

To be honest the open source element of the love assistant bot makes me super excited!!

Why? Because I can’t wait to read their research reports on trends! For instance, how love scammers tend to behave online, the language they use to love-bomb, the patterns they do before they start to ask their victims for money, etc.

This open source function of the bot can really minimise the social cost of love scams by preemption and prevention, which is a really great use case of the viola.ai project!

Open source means that genius developers from all over the world can contribute to the development of this bot, which I find very exciting and optimistic.

Well, the team at Viola.ai just sent me two more videos to review, so two more reviews are coming up after I watch them. Stay tuned and have a good Sunday ahead!