3 AdultFriendFinder red flags — how to avoid scams on AFF

Speak to various AdultFriendFinder users, and they might tell you different things about the long-running hookup site. Some will say that AFF is the Wild West of hooking up — an "anything goes, no judgment here" paradise for steamy adult fun. Others will tell you it's just a platform for bots, fake profiles, and inactive usernames. 

After months of personal testing, I can assure you that the AFF experience comes down to you and how you choose to use the site. If you sign up naively, unaware of your surroundings and how the site actually works, you're going to find it frustrating.

However, if you exercise a little caution and common sense, and if you know how to navigate and spot the scams lurking among the eye-popping NSFW content, you'll have a good time as part of AFF's huge, fun, kink-friendly community.

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Here are three red flags to look out for as you use AFF, to help you spot potential scammers and separate the authentic users from the fake profiles.

Unverified accounts

AdultFriendFinder already offers a first defense against fake profiles, something that it calls ConfirmID. This is how it works: After creating an account, you can — at any point — upload a scanned copy of a government-issued ID card. AFF will then use your device's webcam to take a face-verification scan, confirming that you are the person identified in the government document — and that you're a real, living human being.

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This step strikes the perfect balance between not being onerous enough to annoy the average user but still requiring enough effort to deter scammers, who notoriously go after the low-hanging fruit. 

Once you've completed the ConfirmID sequence, you'll receive a verification badge on your profile, and we strongly recommend that you limit your one-on-one interactions on the site to other verified users. 

Perfect profile photos

Admittedly, this one requires some personal judgment, as everyone should strive to upload good, high-quality photos of themselves to dating websites. But if every photo looks like it belongs in a magazine, or if the person in the photo looks a little too good to be true, you should exercise caution.

In the age of generative AI and filters, it's trivially easy to create a fake photo or series of photos, so you should also be on the lookout for what isn't in the photos. Are there recognizable local landmarks (clubs, restaurants, well-known parks, or street corners) in the photos, or are they all equally generic?

Over-eager chatters

Ever since chatbots became a thing, dating sites have been plagued by them, and as AI improves, it's not always easy to know right away if the "person" you're talking to is really human. One dead giveaway, though, is how much they chat and how quickly they reply. 

Real people go off on tangents, employ non sequiturs, and sometimes stumble with awkward questions or comments. Chatbots, on the other hand, are typically always chipper and extremely fast-talking, so much so that a paragraph-long answer can come back to you in seconds. 

They also almost always have an agenda, too, whether that's directing you to click on a link ("Follow my Instagram profile") or getting you to divulge some potentially compromising bit of personal information about yourself.