The checks worth making before you contact anyone
Safety Warning
The most common losses reported around adult directories are not physical — they are deposits paid to somebody who was never there. This page covers the deposit scam and its variants, the checks that catch them, consent, and what to do when something goes wrong.
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Contact leaves this site immediately
Tapping a contact button hands you to a messaging service or a phone network, and from that moment the directory is not in the conversation. Nobody here reads those messages, holds any money, confirms that a person is still available or knows whether the account replying is the one the listing belongs to. Everything below exists because that handover is where things go wrong.
The deposit scam, and why it works
The pattern is stable enough to describe precisely. Contact is warm and quick. A deposit is requested before an address is given — to confirm you are serious, to hold the slot, because of time-wasters. The amount is small enough that arguing feels petty. Once it is paid, either the address never arrives, or a second payment is needed for a taxi, a hotel deposit, a security fee. It works because it uses urgency to skip the one step that would kill it: paying an unknown person before meeting them.
Checks that take a minute and catch most of it
- Compare the contact that answered against the contact currently shown on the listing. A message from a different number or a different handle is the single most reliable warning sign there is.
- Treat any request for payment before a meeting as the end of the conversation, whatever the reason given.
- Treat gift cards, cryptocurrency, a transfer to a third person's account or a top-up code as diagnostic. Legitimate arrangements do not need any of them.
- Slow down when you are being hurried. Manufactured urgency is the mechanism, not a side effect.
- Notice when photographs and conversation do not match — an inability to answer a simple question about a listing's own details usually means the person answering did not write them.
Information that should never travel
Passwords, one-time codes, full payment-card numbers, banking credentials, your home address before you have decided anything, and identity documents. Intimate images sent as proof of good faith are the raw material of extortion and cannot be recalled once sent. Anyone asking for a code that has just been texted to you is taking over an account, regardless of the story attached.
Consent is specific, present and revocable
Every interaction is between adults who agree to it at the time. A published listing, an earlier message, an agreed rate or a previous meeting is not consent to something else, later, or to continued contact. Consent to one act is not consent to another, and consent given can be withdrawn at any moment. When it is absent, ambiguous or withdrawn, the interaction stops — and that applies to both people in the room.
Practical care around a meeting
Tell somebody you trust where you are going and when you expect to be back. Keep your phone charged and your own means of leaving. Agree what is and is not on offer, and the rate, in advance and in writing rather than at the door. Leave when something feels wrong; the cost of leaving early is always lower than the cost of staying to be polite.
When something has already gone wrong
For anything happening now, or any threat of violence, dial 999. For fraud or extortion after the fact, the Police are still the route, and keeping the messages, the account handles and the payment records intact matters more than anything you can do yourself. Where coercion or control by a third party is the concern, the reporting page sets out what the Police ask for. Tell the directory too if the listing should come down, and read how a listing gets here in the first place to see what removal does and does not achieve.