Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
We examine a new form of online fraud closely related to traditional online romance fraud and catfishing, but which is “industrialized” through enterprise business practices, software platforms, and customer service processes. We conducted an inductive analysis of publicly available testimonial and review data provided by current and prior employees of a specific company in the online customer service contract space. Companies hire individuals online to work as “chat moderators” or “customer service providers” who are told that they are to advance engagement on social media platforms. In fact, they are being recruited as “sexting” workers, paid on a per-text basis to engage in intimate chatting with clients led to believe the workers are female participants on a dating site. The process is mediated via client management processes that monitor employee productivity and monetize all interactions between “clients” and “workers.” The company executes these processes with great efficiency by algorithmically assigning multiple workers to individual clients and assembling background files on clients in real time. We refer to this corporatized form of fraud as Intimacy Manipulated Fraud Industrialization (IMFI) and find that workers serve as both exploiters of their clients as well as victims of the company they work for.
Wang et al. (2023) studied this question.