How "Cheater Buster" websites use fake info and dubious claims to trick people into paying

At 11 a.m. on Wednesday morning, I discovered that my partner Mia has a hidden Tinder Platinum account.

At least, that’s according to the website Swindler AI. I ran Mia’s photo through its “confidential consultation service” that uses “a trained advisory team” and “AI-assisted behavioral pattern analysis” to find matches. The website claimed that the woman in the Tinder profile was a 93% match and located her in New York, which makes sense, because that’s where I live.

Still, I was skeptical. The account’s image was obscured and required a payment to unlock. It could have been anyone. Luckily, the layer that blurred the photo was easy to remove, so I was able to see Mia’s underlying Tinder profile picture. In it, she is wearing the same earrings and necklace she had on in the photo I uploaded. Wait, is she even drinking the same cup of coffee?

Mia is not actually my partner. She isn’t even a real person. The image I uploaded was created with Google AI.

So, it turns out, was the profile that Swindler AI returned to me.

Welcome to the murky world of “cheater buster” websites. Indicator found almost 67,000 ads on Meta for 24 websites that market themselves as a way to “discover if your partner is hiding a secret online profile” or “find out who they are texting.” Nine of the top performing ads in the sample were seen by more than 5.9 million Meta accounts in the EU alone, and several of the advertised websites receive millions of visits each month.

I walked through the services offered by 12 of these websites. The least problematic ones emotionally manipulate people into paying for a reverse phone lookup that yields dubious results. In the worst cases, the websites flat-out fabricate information to sell a bogus service, while playing fast and loose with your data.