Most of the sites are run by larger companies called Meet Us Media and Take Two Digital. Neither responded to requests for comment.

At Georgia State University, Topalli and Wang research the toll of romance scams, the kind where individual perpetrators use popular free dating apps to scam large sums of money from victims that they groom, sometimes for years. For the “moderator” companies Alice and Liam worked for, “there’s deception here, that’s for sure,” says Wang. But unlike typical romance fraud, the transactions take place within the vague contractual agreements of the dating portals. Payments made by the users are limited to batch “coin” subscriptions within these sites, rather than through requests for grand payouts to cover fabricated crises, such as flight tickets or bailouts or fake medical emergencies. “Through this system, they ask a wider pool of people for a smaller amount of money,” says Wang, “though of course this could amount to large amounts for individuals over years of talking.”

For Topalli, these companies are operating in a legal gray area. What they are doing may well be legal, he says, but “that doesn’t mean they are not completely unethical and immoral.”

While sex chat and call lines have been around forever, there is generally a mutual understanding that these are fee-for-service arrangements. If users are instead wooed by ads offering a real dating application and then freelancers are paid to continue this charade, “it constitutes real deception,” he says, “and arguably exploitation on both sides of the internet—both the victims and the workers.”

Freelancers working in the industry say they make a fraction of the money users are paying. Workers earn around 7 cents per message, or €2 an hour. For the company where Liam freelanced, the shifts were six hours a day, six days a week, “and they want you to be active on screen all that time—no breaks,” he says. The 36-hour weeks got him around €400 a month. “It was a pittance,” he says.

In the murky, anonymous, globally dispersed industry, even some of the freelancers aren’t who they say they are—and are working for even less.

In Lagos, 22-year-old physics student Idris—who asked for anonymity to protect his privacy, started working for Cloudworkers, a Swiss company, in June 2020 . The company doesn’t actually hire people in Nigeria, so he has to sublet an account from someone else. He gets 40 percent of the fee paid to the account’s owner. Cloudworkers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

While illegal and not endorsed by the customer service companies, black market subletting is common in the industry. A scroll through Facebook groups dedicated to subcontracting (subcon) chat work finds hundreds of similar requests for people looking to rent accounts—“We make a deal 40/60, I can produce 200 to 400 quality messages daily”—and established moderators selling them—“looking for a moderator for my account with experience, good grammar and knows how to follow rules.”

The companies are known to block accounts suddenly for suspected subcon work. The same Facebook groups are full of questions such as, “anyone else having trouble logging in?” met with comments of “uh-oh, you’ve been blocked.”