This was not supposed to happen. In 2020, in a house surrounded by fields in rural Ireland, 19-year-old Liam sat at his laptop, an energy drink fizzing at his elbow. He leaned in to get a better look at the profile picture and indeed saw the face of an old rugby friend looking back at him.
A few weeks earlier, Liam, whose name has been changed to protect his privacy, was living in Waterford, South East Ireland, about to start his second year at university. Then Covid-19 shut down the city and his university campus. Every Saturday there were now more pigeons than people on the main street. Pubs and cafes closed their doors and employment dried up. “Money wise, it was worrying,” he says.
Increasingly concerned, Liam responded to a Facebook ad for a “freelance customer support representative” who worked remotely for vDesk, a company based in Cyprus. He was invited for an online interview. At the end of the conversation, the interviewer asked what he would think about moderating dating sites.
“I thought I was going to be moderating hateful content on Tinder or something,” he says, “they didn’t know what kind of work it would really be.”
It didn’t take him long to find out. Instead of moderating content, Liam was asked to take on fake online personas — known as “virtuals” — to chat with clients, most of them men looking for relationships or casual sex. Using detailed client profiles and well-crafted virtuals, Liam was expected to trick people into paying message-by-message for conversations with fictional characters. For example, while pretending to be Anna2001, he stared at an old acquaintance. But, he thought, his hands slack on the keyboard, he needed the money. So for the next two minutes, he played the part he was paid to play.
Liam is one of hundreds of freelancers employed around the world to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites. WIRED spoke to dozens of people who work in the industry, people who had worked for months at a time at two of the companies involved in creating virtual profiles. vDesk did not respond to requests for comment. They were often recruited into “customer support” or content moderation roles, and found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription fees from lonely hearts looking for online connections.
In a kitchen in Mexico, more than 5,000 miles from Liam’s home in Ireland, Alice faced a similar dilemma. Frustrated, she circled her cursor over a profile of someone she knew from her hometown in France. His chat history contained all of his personal information: his name, city, job, previous marriages. The names and ages of his children. For almost two years he was talking to a virtual. He says he is in love with her.
Alice – whose name has also been changed to protect her privacy – was next in line to inhabit that virtual space. “I could tell him,” she thought, “and I really should.”
Like Liam, Alice had applied for a vDesk job opening during the pandemic. The vacancy was for a ‘freelance remote translator’. Alice, who was stuck in Mexico and couldn’t pay rent and couldn’t go back to France, went for it. “I even sent them a long cover letter explaining my translation skills,” she says dryly, “how embarrassing.”
