Life Lessons | The Technology In Our Lives
Adult Friend Finder (AFF) Review. Is it Legit or a Scam? How do the scams work? We tested it.
We tested both the female and male sides of AFF. We summarize the scams to be aware of from users and from Adult Friend Finder itself.
In search of more connections in a world increasingly disconnected, I tried some dating apps and websites over the last couple of months. Adult Friend Finder was one of them. And it was so terribly bad that I thought it deserved an honest review. A friend of mine joined me so we could test both the male and female sides of Adult Friend Finder.
We will answer the following questions:
- What is Adult Friend Finder (AFF)? A dating site? A sex & hookup site? A porn site? A scam?
- Who are the users of AFF? Who can you expect to meet on Adult Friend Finder?
- What are the scams to watch for on AFF? How will other users try to scam you?
- What are the scams (or seriously broken features) by AFF itself?
Fasten your seat belt! It’s an ugly road!
How did I end up on Adult Friend Finder (AFF)?
Google brought me to Adult Friend Finder (AFF). Search results provided me with a few “news” pieces and blog posts with relatively positive reviews. Every article I read mentioned that some users were running scams but that, overall, AFF was a fairly good website for hookups.
Just to be clear, a hook-up is a term describing a sexual encounter between people who are not in a dating or serious relationship.
After a few days on the Adult Friend Finder website, I had to seriously wonder how these positive articles about AFF ended up being published. I can only hypothesize that a few of them were written by affiliate marketers if not produced directly by AFF because… My experience on that website was terrible. I asked a friend of mine to test it on the female side, and it was just as atrocious.
So, let me tell you what is wrong with Adult Friend Finder (AFF).
Who are the users of AFF? Who can you expect to meet on Adult Friend Finder?
When you create an account on a dating website, you only experience it from the viewpoint of whatever you defined in your profile. I logged on to Adult Friend Finder as a male looking for women, and I was immediately served with an endless supply of young female profiles. It was as if the world I knew had changed overnight to be mostly populated by beautiful young models!
When my friend created her profile, she had a significantly different picture, and here is the summary of what we’ve seen.
What is a Gold membership on AFF?
Before going any further, let me explain what is a gold membership in Adult Friend Finder.
After creating a profile on AFF, there’s pretty much nothing you can do with a free account. You cannot see other profiles, you cannot send messages, and you cannot use the in-site instant messaging system. The only thing you can do is answer people (or bots) after they have sent you a message.
Everywhere you click on the AFF website with a free account, you get a pop-up telling you to subscribe to a gold membership which is about $60 for three months.
Scam #1: As a male with a gold account, I had a constant flow of notifications about sexy young women having looked at my profile. Exciting, right? Wrong!
I wasn’t sure what was going on until my friend showed me what she could (not) do with her free account. From what I could see, at least 95% of the female users listed as having ‘looked at my account’ were using a free account and, therefore, could not even do such a thing as look at my profile!
This is not a scam by users of the website. From what I have seen, it is something AFF does to make male users feel good and excited. It is pure fiction!
Who are the men on the Adult Friend Finder website?
My friend set up her account as being interested in men 20 to 99 years old. The list of users on her screen was telling an interesting story.
The vast majority of male users were gold members. Men pay to use AFF.
Another interesting observation was that the largest age group on her screen was men in their 50s. There were also a whole bunch above 60, a fair amount in their 40s, and only a handful of profiles younger than 40 years old.
Who are the women on the Adult Friend Finder website?
On my screen, the scenery differed greatly from that of my friend!
First, my screen was full of profiles of women in their 20s and 30s. And then, it was hard to find a woman with a gold membership.
After a bit of digging and experimenting, I had a hard time finding a profile of a “real” woman. Most profiles I interacted with looked like spam and scam, as I will explain later on.
So, what is happening on the Adult Friend Finder website?
From what my friend and I could see, older men create AFF accounts and pay for the dream of hooking up with a woman for casual sex, but they actually interact with an army of scammers preying on desperate men while AFF simultaneously serves them with a dose of fiction for entertainment.
What are the scams conducted by users?
I went down the road of interacting with a few of the young “women” who, apparently, found me attractive, and in all cases, it lead to the same results: money!
One young, blonde, beautiful lady was supposed to be less than two miles away from my location, but after two messages, she claimed she was in Africa on a mission to save the world (or something like that), and after a couple more messages, she needed money to get back home, and then, we would have such a great time finally meeting in person!
Another one was more than a thousand miles from me but insisted that distance didn’t matter to her. She was willing to relocate to be with a “real, mature man” like me. Of course! I’m such a catch! In any case, after a couple of messages, it turned out she was in Cambodia for… I can’t remember! But she needed money to get out of there. See a pattern?
How to detect a scam on Adult Friend Finder?
If I were sarcastic, I would say that it is pretty easy to identify a scam on AFF. If you are a man and a woman is interested in you, it’s a scam!
Of course, I don’t know if all female-male interactions are a scam, but I can tell you I only encountered scams. I didn’t have a single conversation with a “real” woman.
But let’s say you are optimistic and believe you can find women for sex on AFF. There are ways you can quickly filter out obvious scammers. For instance, check the pictures on their profile. In many cases, you notice that it is not even the same person in all pictures.
Google Picture Check
First, download their pictures and have them checked by Google. Simply upload that picture to images.google.com, and Google will tell you everywhere it can find the same picture. Unfortunately, that is not enough. In the case of the beauty stuck in Africa and needing my money to get back to Miami, Google couldn’t find any of her pictures elsewhere online.
I assume that professional scammers manage to find or create pictures that are not posted anywhere else online. So, checking the pictures with Google helps eliminate scammers, but it will still let some go through.
Ask Questions
Another way to identify scammers is by engaging in meaningful conversations. Stay away from the banalities and ask questions that would require a specific answer.
From what I could see, these scammers work on “volume,” so they make extensive usage of copy/paste features (or automated bots). Therefore, you will end up with messages that answer none of your questions or make no sense.
Request A Video Chat
No matter what you do to investigate how real a profile may be, some professional scammers will survive all of these tests. For instance, my African world-saving beauty had a paid gold membership, and Google didn’t find her pictures anywhere else online. With the money they make from desperate old men, some of these scammers invest in gold memberships and photoshoots.
Video chatting is probably the best way to filter out fake profiles. I suspect many scammers are not even women and, in all cases, look nothing like the pictures they sent you. So, they will refuse to video chat or ignore your requests to do so.
If that happens, move on. It’s what I did repeatedly!
What are the scams conducted by AFF itself?
One could argue there are scammers everywhere. I encountered some of them on Tinder as well. But when the company itself looks like a scammer, it tells me to run out of there!
Legal disclaimer: Perhaps what I have perceived as scams by Adult Friend Finder are simply seriously defective features on their website, but… They are mind-boggling!
Fake “Viewed Me”
As I mentioned at the beginning of these articles, AFF regularly notified me that women had viewed my profile when these accounts did not even have access to viewing my account. What a joke!
Selling Fake Features
At one point, I got a message from Adult Friend Finder that I could pay extra for free users to be able to see my profile. I did it! I paid. And guess what? My friend with a free profile still couldn’t see mine!
Points Get Lost
You can buy and send points to other users. Some users are trying to make money on the website by broadcasting live, in the nude of course, waiting for tips (points).
I sent points to my friend. She never got them! So… Points that you buy with real money can disappear.
What is Adult Friend Finder?
After clicking around on the AFF website for a while, the only conclusion to me is that AFF is simply an overpriced porn site.
Users can video broadcast live, and viewers pay them with points which can then be exchanged for money. There are plenty of users doing that, but keep in mind that it will not be of the utmost quality. These live broadcasting sessions can be offered by anybody and everybody.
On AFF, my friend had the feeling of having landed in a park with a bunch of pervs opening their trench coats to expose their genitals!
There’s another category of live broadcasts listed as being provided by models. I’m not sure how these people are recruited, but the sessions may be of a better quality. However, there are plenty of websites for porn, so why would you pick AFF with its prehistoric user interface and the rest of the scams going around?
If you ask me, a better acronym for AFF would be Artificial Fuck Fest. It’s cheap porn packaged as a dating & hook-up website with a user interface that makes you feel you are back in the 80s!
But if that suits you… Enjoy!
Today, let’s reach out to at least one friend to check out on them before it’s too late.
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“A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.” ~James Keller
I published this story in A Windy Life, a publication on Medium.
