Let me start by being extremely clear, and I want every single one of you to hear this, whether you are operating out of a call center in a country I have never visited, sitting behind seventeen layers of VPN in some anonymous corner of the internet, or just winging it from your mom’s basement with a stolen profile picture and a dream. I am not joining your WhatsApp. I am not downloading Telegram for you. I have never heard of Zengi and I intend to keep it that way. Whatever messaging app you have decided is your preferred vehicle for separating lonely, curious, or simply polite people from their money, their dignity, or their personal information, I want you to know that the answer is no, it has always been no, and it will continue to be no until the heat death of the universe renders the question moot.
This is not a personal attack on any particular app. WhatsApp is fine. Telegram has its uses. Signal is genuinely great if you care about privacy. The problem is not the technology. The problem is the pattern, and anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes on a dating app, a social media platform, or really any corner of the internet where strangers can reach out to other strangers knows exactly what this pattern looks like. You match with someone, or they follow you, or they comment on your post, and within a remarkably short window of time, they are asking you to move the conversation somewhere else. Off the platform. Away from whatever thin layer of moderation or accountability the original app provides. Onto something more private, more encrypted, more difficult to trace, and conveniently more amenable to whatever scheme they are about to run on you.
And the thing is, they are good at it. The people who run these operations are not stupid. They have scripts, they have playbooks, they have entire training manuals built on years of psychological research into what makes people trust strangers, what makes people feel special, what makes people override their better instincts in favor of the warm fuzzy feeling of a new connection. They know that loneliness is real and widespread and that most people, deep down, want to believe that the attractive person who reached out to them out of nowhere is genuinely interested. They know that social norms make it awkward to be rude to someone who seems friendly. They know that if they can get you off the original platform before you have had time to develop any real skepticism, they have dramatically improved their odds of success.
So they ask you to move. Always. It is almost a universal tell at this point. The conversation starts on Instagram or Tinder or Facebook or wherever else, and within a few messages, sometimes within the very first message, they are steering you toward WhatsApp, toward Telegram, toward whatever app they have decided is the best place to complete the con. Sometimes they frame it as privacy. Sometimes they say the original app is glitchy or that they do not check it often. Sometimes they are more aggressive about it, almost impatient, as if the entire conversation is just a formality before they can get to the real business of moving you somewhere less supervised.
Here is what they do not tell you about those apps, and here is what I think a lot of people genuinely do not understand about the ecosystem they are walking into when they agree to move the conversation. Apps like WhatsApp and Telegram are not inherently evil. I want to be absolutely clear about that because I do not want this to turn into some technophobic screed against encrypted messaging. Encryption is good. Privacy is good. The ability to communicate without a corporation reading every word you type is genuinely valuable and important. But the same features that make these apps attractive for legitimate users, the end-to-end encryption, the minimal identity verification, the lack of robust content moderation, also make them extraordinarily attractive for people who are doing things they do not want anyone to find out about.
Telegram in particular has become something of a wild west. There are channels on Telegram with hundreds of thousands of members dedicated to everything from sharing stolen financial information to coordinating fraud operations to distributing content that would get someone arrested in most countries. This is not speculation or moral panic. This is well-documented and has been reported on extensively by journalists and security researchers who have spent time mapping the actual landscape of what gets shared on that platform. The same is true, to varying degrees, of other apps that position themselves as privacy-focused alternatives to mainstream social media. The privacy cuts both ways. It protects legitimate dissidents and journalists and people who have genuine reasons to communicate without surveillance. It also protects people who are running pig-butchering scams out of compound operations in Southeast Asia where the workers themselves are often trafficking victims.
That last part is worth sitting with for a moment, because I think when most people imagine a social media scammer, they imagine some lone operator who is just kind of sleazy and financially opportunistic. The reality, increasingly, is much darker. A significant portion of the romance scam and cryptocurrency fraud industry is run by organized criminal enterprises that operate at industrial scale, and a significant portion of the people actually running those scripts and sending those messages are themselves victims, people who were lured to foreign countries with promises of legitimate work and then had their passports taken away and were forced to operate fraud stations under threat of violence. When you engage with these operations, even just by clicking the link and downloading the app they recommend, you are touching something that has real human suffering at multiple levels. That is worth knowing.
But even setting aside the darkest end of the spectrum, even just talking about the ordinary run-of-the-mill scammer who is trying to extract a gift card or a wire transfer or some compromising photos they can use for blackmail, the move to a private messaging app is almost always a red flag. It is a move designed to isolate you. It cuts you off from the relative transparency of a platform where your friends might see something weird happening, where the app’s own systems might flag unusual behavior, where there is at least some record that an interaction occurred. Once you are in a private chat with someone you do not actually know, you are in their territory, operating by their rules, and they have had a lot more practice at this than you have.
Now, here is where I want to make the distinction that I think actually matters, because I am not trying to tell anyone to become a hermit or to refuse all digital communication with people they have not met in person. I have WhatsApp. I use it regularly. It is a perfectly reasonable way to communicate with people. The point is not the app. The point is who is in your contacts.
Think about it this way. Your WhatsApp contacts, your Telegram contacts, your Signal contacts, whatever, those should be people you have some genuine basis for trusting. Family members. Friends. Colleagues you have worked with in person. People you have met in real life and have some actual relationship with. People you have known online for a long time across multiple contexts and have developed genuine trust with over time. The bar does not have to be impossibly high. But there should be a bar. There should be some answer to the question of who is this person and why should I trust them with direct access to my phone number and a private communication channel.
A random attractive person who matched with you on a dating app yesterday does not clear that bar. A stranger who followed you on Instagram and immediately started complimenting your photos does not clear that bar. Someone who reached out through a Facebook group and wants to discuss a business opportunity does not clear that bar, not yet, not based on that alone. Trust is built over time and through experience, not granted on request to whoever asks nicely enough. And the request to move to a private messaging app, especially when it comes early and when it comes with some urgency or pressure behind it, is almost never innocent.
The specific mechanics of how these scams play out vary, but the structure is remarkably consistent. There is a period of establishing rapport, which can last anywhere from a few days to several months depending on how sophisticated the operation is and how high-value a target they believe they have found. During this period everything seems fine, often more than fine, often suspiciously wonderful, because the person on the other end has been trained to be attentive and charming and to say exactly the right things. Then comes the pivot, which might be a request for money to cover some emergency, an introduction to a supposedly incredible investment opportunity, a request for photos, or some other form of extraction. By that point, if the scammer has done their job well, the target has already developed real feelings about the relationship, real trust, real emotional investment, and that investment gets weaponized.
The private messaging app is the infrastructure that makes all of this possible. It is where the relationship gets built, where the manipulation happens, where the ask eventually lands, and where the evidence disappears afterward. You cannot screenshot your way out of a situation where the other person controls the channel.
So what is the actual practical guidance here, beyond just being angry about it, which I fully am and which I think is a reasonable response? The core principle is simple enough to state, even if it requires some discipline to actually follow. Do not give strangers on the internet a private communication channel just because they asked for one. Full stop. If someone you meet online wants to continue talking to you, there is no reason that conversation cannot continue on the platform where it started, at least until you have enough of a genuine relationship with them to make a more private channel appropriate. If they are pushing hard to move off-platform, that pressure itself is information. Legitimate people do not usually need to rush you off the app. Legitimate people understand that a stranger might want to take things slowly. Legitimate people do not get weird or impatient or guilt-trippy when you say you would rather keep chatting here for now.
It is also worth being honest with yourself about the vulnerability that these scammers are targeting. Loneliness is real. The desire for connection, for romance, for friendship, for a sense that someone out there finds you interesting and attractive, that is a deeply human thing and there is nothing shameful about it. The scammers are not exploiting a weakness unique to gullible or stupid people. They are exploiting something that is present in virtually every human being to some degree. The reason the playbook works is not because the targets are unusually naive. It is because the scammers are unusually skilled at identifying and activating genuine human emotional needs. Understanding that does not make you immune, but it does make it easier to recognize when something feels a little too good a little too fast.
The other thing worth naming is that the apps themselves bear some responsibility here, even if they are not going to get a particularly sympathetic treatment in this particular essay. Dating apps and social media platforms know that their services are being used to funnel people toward these private channel scam operations. They have data on the patterns. They know what the scripts look like. The fact that moderation and enforcement remain so inadequate is not purely a technical challenge. It is a business decision. Platforms have limited incentive to aggressively crack down on fake profiles and scam accounts because user numbers and engagement numbers look better when they include bots and fakes. The users who get defrauded are not usually the ones who get counted in the quarterly reports.
At the end of it all, what I really want to say is this. Your safety and your financial wellbeing and your emotional health are worth protecting, and protecting them sometimes means being the person who seems a little paranoid, a little unfriendly, a little unwilling to just go along with what a stranger on the internet is asking you to do. That is fine. Being thought of as unhelpful by a scammer is not a social cost. It is an outcome to actively pursue. The apps do not matter. The specific name they use for whatever platform they are trying to herd you onto does not matter. What matters is that you know why they are asking, you understand what they are trying to accomplish by isolating you in a private channel, and you have made a conscious decision about who actually deserves that kind of access to you.
WhatsApp is in my phone. I use it to talk to people I actually know and trust. That list was not built by saying yes to every stranger who asked to be added to it. It was built slowly, through actual relationships, with actual people, over actual time. That is how it should work. And to everyone out there who is trying to shortcut that process by sliding into someone’s DMs with a pitch about moving to a more private channel, I hope this essay finds you well, I hope you read every word of it, and I hope you understand that the answer, now and forever, is no.